Morre Ota, cartunista e lendário editor da revista 'Mad', aos 67 anos

 

Conbinando traço econômico e texto mordaz, Otacílio Costa d’Assunção Barros se tornou referência do humor gráfico brasileiro, celebrado por colegas; artista foi encontrado morto em seu apartamento no Rio

Mariana Teixeira e Emiliano Urbim

Morreu nesta sexta-feira (24) o cartunista, quadrinista e editor Ota, atuante desde os anos 1970 e que se destacou na edição brasileira da revista de humor "Mad". Otacílio Costa d’Assunção Barros, nascido no Rio de Janeiro em 1954, tinha 67 anos.

O corpo do ilustrador foi encontrado em seu apartamento na Rua Ernani Cotrim, na Tijuca, Zona Norte do Rio. A morte, causada por um mal súbito, foi confirmada ao GLOBO pela família. Ota se sentiu mal na quarta-feira (22) e queixou-se com o dono do restaurante em que almoçava todos os dias, mas voltou para casa normalmente. Como morava sozinho e não retornou ao estabelecimento nos dias seguintes, o proprietário do local, juntamente com os vizinhos, acharam estranho e acionaram a família. Ao arrombarem a porta do apartamento, encontraram o artista morto.

Em 1974, Ota se tornou o editor responsável pela versão nacional da "Mad", que marcaria sua carreira. Na revista, ele publicava os populares "Relatórios Ota", onde assinava arte e texto, combinado traço simples e piadas mordazes para dar sua visão sarcástica a temas como política, Rio de Janeiro, esquemas de pirâmide ou sexo.

Capa de "O relatório Ota sobre sexo" Foto: Reprodução

Permaneceria na "Mad" enquanto a revista mudava de editora, saindo da Vecchi para Record (1984-2000), Mythos (2000-2006) e Panini (2008). Ao deixar a última, após um conflito profissional, declarou que iria leiloar todo o acervo relacionado à "Mad". Segundo amigos e parentes, seus últimos anos de vida foram de dificuldades financeiras.

Filho mais velho entre cinco irmãos, Ota tinha uma relação próxima com a irmã Constança e seus filhos, André d'Assunção e Iaci d'Assunção André conta que a vida do tio foi muito intensa e que ele o considera uma enciclopédia sobre produção editorial.

— Os personagens do Ota eram a vida dele. Estar perto dele era ver as referências da vida real misturadas com a fantasia. A vida pessoal dele era totalmente refletida na arte.  — recorda o sobrinho. — Uma das coisas que acho mais marcante nele foi a quantidade de pessoas que ele deu oportunidade para se lançarem. 

Essa característica, de dar a chance para novos talentos, é reforçada pelo jornalista e especialista em desenho de humor, Ricky Goodwin, seu amigo pessoal e colega de trabalho.

— Além de muita gente nova ter começado profissionalmente nas revistas que Ota editou, ele abria espaço para veteranos que não tinham onde publicar seus quadrinhos — recorda o jornalista.

Personagem que era uma espécie de alter-ego de Ota em seus quadrinhos Foto: Reprodução

 

Goodwin e Ota tornaram-se amigos na faculdade e realizaram muitos projetos juntos. Ele conta que, às vezes, era difícil acompanhar a velocidade criativa e emocional do artista. Na época do Orkut, existia uma comunidade que reunia as pessoas com quem ele tinha brigado.

— Ota podia ser irrascível mas quase sempre era incrível. O Incrível Ota. É um absurdo imenso que ele, por tudo que fez e pela sua genialidade, não ter tido, principalmente nos últimos anos, maior reconhecimento. Seus tempos finais foram sem trabalhos e sem dinheiro. Embora continuasse produzindo, sem parar — desabafa Goodwin — Os quadrinhos ainda são marginalizados no Brasil, e o Ota, um ser dos quadrinhos, vivia uma vida à margem, uma lembrança para todos que cresceram com a "Mad", mas sem espaço para a sua produção atual e sua experiência como editor.

Relatório Ota do Rio de Janeiro Foto: Reprodução

 

Influência para outros artistas

Para o quadrinista e roteirista Arnaldo Branco, é grande a importância de Ota no cenário brasileiro:

— A importância dele é tremenda. Foi o primeiro contato de várias gerações com o humor gráfico, graças a seu trabalho na "Mad", que era como um "Pasquim" pra adolescentes. Fora seu trabalho como tradutor e editor de vários quadrinhos nacionais e estrangeiros — diz Branco. — Ele influenciou muito o meu trabalho. Todo desenhista de traço, vamos dizer assim, econômico deve demais ao Ota. Ele me encorajava a ser direto, cru e infame.

Branco acrescenta que conheceu Ota assim que começou a publicar:

— Era uma figura, maluco e querido. Era amado por todo mundo na cena, nunca ouvi ninguém falar uma palavra negativa sobre ele.

Ota no Boteco do Tinoco, restaurante da Tijuca que frequentava com frequência Foto: Arquivo pessoal

Marcelo Martinez, roteirista, cartunista e designer gráfico, conta que "Ota era o cartunista mais rápido do oeste".

— Era capaz de, no meio de uma conversa, sacar uma caneta, desenhar uma piada em um guardanapo e guardar de volta no bolso no colete, dizendo: "depois eu passo a limpo". Mas o desenho já estava pronto! — recorda Martinez. — Ota organizou um monte de eventos. Lançou muita gente no mercado, sempre repetindo que "para ficar bom, tem que publicar.  Porque o cara vê o trabalho impresso e entende o que podia ficar melhor".

Martinez acrescenta que "para todos nós, Ota era imortal".

— Conheci o Ota numa palestra, quando estava no primeiro período da faculdade, em 1990. No final, pedi para mostrar meus desenhos. Ele disse "prepara um material e leva na editora." Fiz isso e cheguei lá uma semana depois, com a pasta caprichada. Ele: "Pô, tô saindo pra almoçar, mas deixa eu ver: isso não, isso não, isso sim. Deixa aqui e passa depois para pegar o cheque." — lembra o cartunista. — Estou sem ação. Perco meu primeiro editor, o cara que apostou nas minhas piadas, que me ligava pra pedir uma dica de fonte tipográfica e emendava o papo com ideias de revistas malucas que nunca faria.

O animador, cartunista, ilustrador e quadrinista Allan Sieber lembra com alegria o quanto Ota era "uma figura", grande colecionador de quadrinhos, com muita energia e com algumas excentricidades.

— Teve uma época que ele tinha tinha dois apartamentos, um só para quadrinhos e o outro, que ele morava, também já estava entulhado. Eu admirava o ritmo dele, ele era uma usina mesmo. E uma pessoa maluca de verdade  Por exemplo: ele entrava no banho vestido, se lavava e ao mesmo tempo lavava as roupas. Saía do chuveiro com a roupa toda molhada e deixava secando no corpo. Assim, a roupa já ia ficando passada — recorda Sieber, rindo.

Tira da série "The Ota Adventures" Foto: Reprodução

 

Fabiane Langona, cartunista e quadrinista, considerava Ota um padrinho e diz que, praticamente, se alfabetizou com o trabalho dele.

— Foi ele que me abriu as portas para a percepção de um mundo onde a gente poderia escrever bastante e desenhar menos, sem aquele academicismo  — conta Langona. — Podemos ser grandes e maravilhosos, como ele era, desenhando de forma pura e autêntica.

Segundo o especialista em quadrinhos e humor gráfico Sidney Gusman, Ota está presente em muitos capítulos da história dos quadrinhos nacionais. Na opinião de Gusman, sua passagem pela Vecchi é o grande momento da carreira, como roteirista e, especialmente, como editor.

Trajetória

Formado em jornalismo na UFRJ, ota ingressou na icônica Editora Brasil-América Latina (EBAL) em 1970, permanecendo até o final de 1973, quando entrou para a Editora Vecchi. No mesmo ano, lançou pela editora Górrion três edições totalmente autorais da revista "Os Birutas", cujos personagens também foram publicados como tiras diárias no período entre 1972 e 73. Nessa mesma época colaborou para publicações underground como "A Roleta", "Vírus" e "A mosca".

Em 1974 se tornou o editor responsável pela versão brasileira da revista americana "Mad", na qual exerceria diversos cargos, deixando o título em definitivo em 2008.

Durante sua primeira fase na "Mad", Ota também foi editor da cultuada revista de terror "Spektro" a partir de 1977, até o fechamento da Vecchi, em 1983. Em 1984, publicou pela Record o livro "O quadrinho erótico de Carlos Zéfiro", uma análise que ajudou a firmar o reconhecimento em torno dos "catecismos".

Um apaixonado pela história dos quadrinhos, ele foi responsável pelas reedições de "Luluzinha" e "Recruta Zero" pela Pixel, além de ser responsável pela coleção de álbuns do personagem Asterix pela Record.

Revista do Ota, premiada no HQ Mix Foto: Reprodução

Em 1994, recebeu o prêmio de Melhor Revista Independente no Troféu HQ Mix pelo título "Revista do Ota", que teve apenas um número. Em 2005, assinou no Jornal do Brasil uma coluna sobre quadrinhos e, no ano seguinte, começa a publicar a tira Concursino para o jornal "Folha Dirigida".

Publicou de forma independente o e-book "A garota bipolar - o começo de tudo" em 2016. Em 2020, foi bem-sucedido o financiamento coletivo para publicação em papel da série, que aguarda lançamento.

Seu último trabalho público começou há quatro meses: em junho de 2021, passou a publicar tiras sobre a vida universitária no site da Faculdade Campos Elíseos, de São Paulo.

O Globo

How America Failed in Afghanistan

 

By

Isaac Chotiner

The New Yorker

 

On Sunday, as the Taliban entered Kabul—the last remaining major Afghan city not under the group’s control—the President of the country, Ashraf Ghani, fled to Tajikistan, making clear that the U.S.-backed Afghan government had collapsed. Five months ago, in April, President Joe Biden announced that all U.S. and NATO troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Critics have accused the Administration of conducting a rushed, poorly planned, and chaotic withdrawal since then. On Thursday, the U.S. government announced that it would be sending in marines and soldiers to help evacuate embassy personnel. But the speed of the Taliban advance has stunned American officials and left desperate Afghans trying to flee the country. Responding to criticism about his plan, Biden has sought to shift blame to the Afghan government and its people, saying, “They have got to fight for themselves.”

I spoke by phone with my colleague, the New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll, about the situation in Afghanistan. The dean of Columbia Journalism School, Coll is the author of “Ghost Wars” and “Directorate S,” which together chronicle much of the history of the past several decades in Afghanistan and Pakistan. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why it has been so hard for the United States to train the Afghan army, the different humanitarian crises facing the country, and the Biden Administration’s “outrageous” callousness toward a situation America played a role in creating.

What about the events of the past few weeks has surprised you, and what was the predictable result of Biden’s policy announcement in April?

I think the speed of the political collapse in Afghanistan surprised a lot of people. The pathway of the collapse was predicted and predictable. This has happened in Afghan political and military history a couple of times before. But there was a speed and momentum of people recalculating where their interests lay, and switching sides, and capitulating without violence that I don’t think the Biden Administration had expected when it announced its timetable in the spring.

You could argue that this shows the Biden Administration’s policy was a mistake, but you could also argue that, if this was going to happen so quickly after two decades of American troops in Afghanistan, there was no way to make this work without pledging to stay forever. How do you think about those two ways of looking at the situation, or do you think that dichotomy isn’t helpful?

I think that dichotomy describes two poles that represent the range of choices that the Biden Administration faced, and in between those poles had been, more or less, the policy going back to the second term of the Barack Obama Administration—which was a smaller, sustained deployment. There were twenty-five hundred troops there when the Biden Administration came to office. The rate of casualties incurred by NATO forces was almost at the level of traffic accidents for much of the past couple of years. So a sustained, smaller deployment—not free, but nothing like the expenditures of the past—linked to a search for some more sustainable political outcome had been visible. The Trump Administration followed that path, too, picking it up from the Obama Administration, and the Trump White House had become quite ambitious about it. It had negotiated with the Taliban an agreement that had a timetable, including regarding American withdrawal. But, until the Trump Administration got to that point, it had been following the same pathway as its predecessor.

I think in between was this question of whether the benefits of a messy degree of stability justified having the small-to-medium deployment that America has in other parts of the world. That is what you are going to hear in Washington. The counter-argument to the Biden Administration’s policy is not going to be forever war and the defeat of the Taliban; it is going to be a critique of the haste with which it pulled the plug on what was not a large deployment, and one that was not incurring a lot of casualties.

Why, ultimately, was it so hard to stand up the Afghan military to a greater extent than America did? Was it some lack of political legitimacy? Some problem with the actual training?

I don’t know what proportion of the factors, including the ones you listed, to credit. But I think that the one additional reason it didn’t work was the sheer scale of the ambition. And this was visible in Iraq as well. Building a standing army of three hundred thousand in a country that has been shattered by more than forty consecutive years of war and whose economy is almost entirely dependent on external aid—that just doesn’t work. What did work was what at various stages people thought might be possible, which was to build a stronger, more coherent, better-trained force, which has effectively been the only real fighting force on behalf of the Kabul government over the past few years. This force is referred to as commandos or Special Forces, but it is basically twenty or thirty thousand people. That you can build with a lot of investment and hands-on training. But you can’t just create an army of three hundred thousand. I remember talking to the Pakistani generals about this circa 2012. And they all said, “You just can’t do that. It won’t work.” They turned out to be right.

The writer Anand Gopal, who has reported extensively from Afghanistan, wrote, “The US designed the Afghan state to meet Washington’s counterterrorism interests, not the interests of Afghans, and what we see today is the result.” Do you agree?

I assume what that means is that the state-building project, such as it was—and about which there were varying degrees of commitment, including very little at the very beginning, after the fall of the last Taliban government—was undermined by the dependence on independent militias and commanders whose role in security was seen as necessary, especially early on, because the main U.S.-led NATO agenda in Afghanistan and the region was counterterrorism. The men under arms—the power brokers or warlords—were seen as essential to that agenda, and it was very difficult to build a normal state when the militias were beyond political accountability (never mind the rule of law) and dominating so many regions of the country.

Over time, there was a recognition that this was not sustainable, and there were efforts to try to fold them into a more normal-looking state and constitutional military, but that project was never accompanied by a push for accountability or an end to the effective independence and corruption associated with those regional militias. I assume you can say that is all the fault of the Western design, but I am not sure I buy that. Afghanistan had these fighting forces on its soil on 9/11 because of the continuous war that had been triggered by the Soviet invasion in 1979, and they didn’t require a U.S.-dictated constitutional design to persist. Of course, they persisted. The real complication about the design of the Afghan state that is now collapsing has at least as much to do with Afghans coming into the country from exile—the same dynamic that we saw in Iraq. Often, very talented and committed people who had been forced out of the country by the wars going back to the late nineteen-seventies tried to bargain with the leaders in Afghanistan about what kind of constitutional and power-sharing system should be designed. They were trying to create a system that would accommodate the power of the militias who had never left, in a very centralized constitutional design.

President Biden’s attitude toward Afghanistan of late has seemed to be one of annoyance, while he’s also putting a strong emphasis on the need for Afghans to stand up and fight for their country. How do you feel about an American President putting that forward after the U.S. has been intimately involved in that country for decades?

I try to tamp down my emotions about it, because I think it is an outrageous critique. I can understand the frustration that American decision-makers have had with their partners in the Kabul government for the past twenty years. It has been a very rocky road, and it isn’t all the fault of U.S. Presidents and Vice-Presidents and national-security advisers. But to suggest that the Afghan people haven’t done their bit is a kind of blame-shifting that I think is not only unjustifiable but outrageous. The Afghans now have suffered generation after generation of not just continuous warfare but humanitarian crises, one after the other, and Americans have to remember that this wasn’t a civil war that the Afghans started among themselves that the rest of the world got sucked into. This situation was triggered by an outside invasion, initially by the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, and since then the country has been a battleground for regional and global powers seeking their own security by trying to militarily intervene in Afghanistan, whether it be the United States after 2001, the C.I.A. in the nineteen-eighties, Pakistan through its support first for the mujahideen and later the Taliban, or Iran and its clients. To blame Afghans for not getting their act together in light of that history is just wrong.

Next door to Afghanistan, in what is now Pakistan, the British stayed a very long time and then left so abruptly, in 1947, that it resulted in incredible bloodletting. Do you see a callback to that imperial age, in the sense that the outside power wants to wash its hands of the situation and says that it is done without much care for how it leaves?

I agree with that. There is a lot to learn, and, in fairness to the Biden Administration, it inherited from the Trump Administration a terrible situation, because of the concessions the Trump Administration had made to the Taliban about the timing of a U.S. withdrawal. I said earlier that the U.S. deployment that Biden pulled was small, and the violence faced by them was de minimis, but that was true largely because of the terms of the flawed deal that the Trump Administration had negotiated with the Taliban, in which one of the commitments by the Taliban was not to attack U.S. troops in exchange for a hard deadline of May of this year for the last troops to leave. So, when the Biden Administration, in the pressure-filled first weeks of its term, reviewed the situation, it understandably feared that, if it tried to repudiate or rewrite the agreement that the Trump Administration had reached, it might transform a relatively quiet and stable experience for the U.S. military into another bloody round of combat that would undermine the Administration’s plans and foreign-policy priorities. So it pulled the plug and got exactly that result, which is now all that anyone is talking about.

But, to go back to your original observation, I do think that the haste and indifference, the blaming of the Afghans, the linkage of the decision to narrow U.S. interests and the anniversary of 9/11, all of that did have an air of—maybe “contempt” is not too strong a word for it—about what the consequences of this would be in Afghanistan. The decisions of the Obama Administration, and the Trump Administration in the first couple of years, reflected a rare political consensus in the United States that there was a willingness to sustain a relatively small troop deployment and expenditures in Afghanistan for a path out that would not lead to what we are watching now. And the President himself seems to have personally decided that that was a fool’s errand, and that he would not persist with what he perceived to be the illusions around that kind of search. But there was no crisis in expenditure or war from the American perspective that would have required such a quick decision.

O.K., but doesn’t the speed at which this is now happening suggest that the Taliban would never have negotiated something in good faith for a long-term solution.

It certainly suggests that the Taliban were not serious about ever sharing power in the way that the United States and its European allies and many sections of the Afghan government and society had hoped they might. But the problem was not a naïve faith that the Taliban had lessened their unwillingness to share power, because they hadn’t. They had been terribly stubborn throughout the negotiations. They declined even to talk to the Afghan government on very ideological grounds of historical legitimacy. So there was no reason to say that the Taliban had passed the test of credible international diplomacy, but they were talking. And the hope was that, over time, they could be drawn gradually to demonstrations of reduced violence in which the conversation about political futures would not be dominated by the violence and revolutionary ambitions of the Taliban’s history. Look at the negotiations with the FARC in Colombia. How long did those last? Twenty years? Even now, you have a messy result, but these are not negotiations that typically result quickly in an agreement. You would expect it to be a very slow process.

What was flawed about the Trump Administration’s agreement was not a misunderstanding of the Taliban necessarily, but the timeline it set. The Administration basically used the negotiations as cover to leave before it had achieved any of the things that it said the negotiations were designed to do.

But is there any tension between saying, essentially, on the one hand that the deployment was not costing that many Americans lives and on the other that we got the Taliban to stop killing so many Americans only because we promised to leave? Could we have kept that balance if we weren’t promising to leave?

The American casualty rate was low even before the Taliban agreed to stop attacking Americans. This is not to say that each loss wasn’t painfully felt and meaningful, but coverage on the rate of casualty had disappeared from the news cycle starting around 2015 or 2016, when the deployment was down to the ten-thousand range. The problem with sustainability outside the negotiations was the way in which the war was being prosecuted after NATO troops were drawn way down; essentially, it was an air war connected to the Special Forces on the ground. A harder question about this middle-way policy is how long you are going to bomb the Taliban into submission. The reason there was a military stalemate from roughly 2006 to this summer was that the American-led coalition, including the Afghan forces on the ground, had a monopoly on air power, and the Taliban had no answer for air power. But, of course, bombing in a country like Afghanistan is never precise, and there are civilian casualties and a sense of siege in some of the areas where air power was brought to bear. How long was that going to be the answer?

Your books on the region suggest that the Taliban may not have initially come to power, nor survived this long, had it not been for the aid and comfort of the Pakistani security apparatus—its military and intelligence services. How is Pakistan feeling about what’s happening now? I sense maybe there’s a tiny bit more anxiety than usual about what this might mean for Pakistan.

It seems likely that it is partially a case of watching what you wish for. I am sure they did not forecast the speed with which events are unfolding this summer, and they may also have expected that the role of negotiations and the timetable by which political change would occur in Afghanistan would allow them to build a platform for greater international legitimacy and credibility for a potential Taliban government. One of the reasons that I would be anxious if I were them is that this is happening in a way that is already inducing governments such as Germany’s—not usually first out of the box on these things—to say that they won’t provide any aid to a government that imposes Sharia against the will of its people.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Biden’s negotiator, is trying to tell the Taliban that they won’t be recognized by anyone if they take power this way. Well, we’ll see. In the nineteen-nineties, there were only three governments in the world that recognized the Taliban: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. And this time around, too, Pakistan will be one of them, I expect. But things are different. The Saudis and the Emiratis have a new geopolitical outlook. But China is not the same country that it was in the nineties. How will China support Pakistan in trying to manage a second Taliban regime, especially one that may attract sanctions or other kinds of pressure from the United States and its allies? It isn’t the nineties, but Pakistan is still in the same awkward place that it was last time around. And to the extent that the Taliban return to a kind of internationalism of their interpretation of Islam and welcome Al Qaeda types or other forms of radicals, allow the Islamic State to incubate on Afghan soil, or don’t have the interest or the capacity to do something about it, you can be sure that, as it did the last time, all of that will blow back on Pakistan in one way or another, be that in the form of international pressure or instability.

How do you see the next month playing out?

It is important for the international community to recognize that Afghanistan is entering another devastating humanitarian crisis of the kind it has seen too many times before, between refugee flows, insecurity in the areas that the Taliban have seized, uncertainty about how the Taliban will handle their enemies—will there be mass executions or internments? Then, you add to that the COVID crisis and the humanitarian challenges in rural Afghanistan that were already in place before this summer, and you are looking at a really dark season for the Afghan population. I don’t expect the Biden Administration to change its policy, and even if it did I don’t expect that it could reverse the Taliban’s momentum without bombing Afghanistan to smithereens. But it can certainly take responsibility for the lion’s share of the response to this unfolding humanitarian crisis, which after all does involve a little bit of self-interest, because, if Afghanistan generates another massive refugee flow toward Europe, that will have political consequences that will wash right through the West.

Traidor socorre traidor

 

 

ALDO FORNAZIERI 

Ao socorrer Bolsonaro quando
este enfrentava um forte fogo
nutrido vindo do STF, Michel
Temer foi saudado como um gran-
de constitucionalista, um pacificador,
por setores políticos, analistas e jorna-
listas da grande mídia. A saudação não
causou estranheza, pois a política bra-
sileira se move sob a égide da hipocrisia.
Nunca se diz o que deve ser dito. As coi-
sas nunca são apresentadas como real-
mente são. A farsa e a mentira prevale-
cem. Bolsonaro é apenas a face radica-
lizada da histórica cultura da hipocri-
sia política no Brasil. Aqui, os hipócri-
tas não precisam de esforço para dissi-
mular ou fingir, pois sabem que, quan-
do quase todos os gatos são pardos, ne-
nhum acusa ou denuncia o outro.

Pois bem: Michel Temer é um traidor
do Brasil e de seu povo. Socorreu outro
traidor da pátria, que é Bolsonaro. Não é
a primeira vez: em 1999, quando Bolsona-
ro propôs fuzilar o então presidente Fer-
nando Henrique Cardoso e mais “uns 30
mil”, foi socorrido e salvo da cassação por
Temer. Em nenhum país democrático do
mundo um parlamentar que propusesse
fuzilar um presidente ou primeiro-mi-
nistro ficaria com seu mandato. Naquela
ocasião, Temer traiu a democracia, a deis-
cência, o decorro parlamentar e a própria
Câmara dos Deputados.

vavelmente a maior, consistiu em enga-
nar a presidenta Dilma Rousseff e o PT,
partido com o qual tinha feito uma alian-
ça em nome do PMDB. Seu comparsa de
traições, Eduardo Cunha, testemunhou
que Temer liderava as articulações do
impeachment-golpe três meses antes do
processo. Segundo Cunha, não foi uma
participação qualquer: Temer foi líder da
conspiração que levou à deposição de Dil-
ma, mergulhou o Brasil numa crise polí-
tica interminável e proporcionou a vitó-
ria de Bolsonaro em 2018.

Não contente com a sua traição, como
presidente-usurpador, Temer também en-
ganou os trabalhadores brasileiros, enca-
minhando uma reforma que tirou direi-
tos e agravou o desemprego e a pobreza.
A reforma foi contra o espírito e a letra da
Constituição de 1988, assentados na ga-
rantia de direitos, não só civis e políticos,
como também sociais. A Constituição co-
locou-se em linha com a Declaração de Di-
reitos da ONU, ao entender que os direitos
sociais e trabalhistas também integram os
Direitos Humanos.

Agora, Temer deu mais um passo na
sua ignominiosa história de vilanias e
traições. Apresentou-se como um es-
pírito maligno para proteger o grande
mal que é Bolsonaro. Salvou Bolsona-
ro, que converteu o Brasil numa vas-
ta arena de ódios, um vale de intrigas e
mentiras, uma necrópole onde são se-
pultados os corpos e os sonhos de qua-
se 600 mil pessoas que não tiveram o
socorro e os cuidados necessários que
o Estado e o governo tinham a obriga-
ção de lhes prestar. O Brasil tornou-se
essa necrópole onde não são sepultados
apenas corpos, mas o próprio espírito
moral da nação, degradada por um pre-
sidente indigno, vil, insensível e impie-
doso, que debocha dos vivos e dos mor-
tos e trai diariamente a Constituição.

Temer associa-se criminosamente a
essa traição. Se Temer fosse constitu-
cionalista, denunciaria as violações que
Bolsonaro perpetra. Socorremo-nos
aqui de Ulysses Guimarães. Ao promul-
gar a Constituição disse: “Quanto a ela
(a Constituição), discordar, sim. Diver-
gir, sim. Descumprir, jamais. Afrontá-la,
nunca. Traidor da Constituição é traidor
da Pátria. Conhecemos o caminho maldi-
to: rasgar a Constituição, trancar as por-
tas do Parlamento, garrotear a liberda-
de, mandar os patriotas para a cadeia, o
exílio, o cemitério”. Logo adiante, Ulys-
ses completou dizendo que “temos ódio
à ditadura. Ódio e nojo”.

O “grande constitucionalista” Temer
dispôs-se a ajudar Bolsonaro a reabrir o
caminho maldito que leva à invasão do
STF e do Senado, ao fechamento das por-
tas do Parlamento, que aprofunda o vale
do ódio e da morte e que transforma o Bra-
sil num deserto moral.

Enquanto Temer se especializou na ar-
te da traição, Bolsonaro se especializou
na arte da esperteza dos covardes. Foi in-
disciplinado no Exército, chegando a pre-
parar atentados terroristas. Expulso pe-
lo Exército foi salvo pelo Superior Tribu-
nal Militar. Ao ameaçar fuzilar FHC e mi-
lhares de brasileiros, foi salvo por Temer.
Ao defender torturadores, ditadores, pro-
ferir injúrias raciais e ofender mulheres,
sempre contou com a complacência dos
liberais e das esquerdas. O próprio FHC
confessou recentemente que não o leva-
va a sério. Quem acredita agora na boa-
-fé da sua carta à nação? É mais uma far-
sa da sua esperteza criminosa. Bolsonaro
precisa ser destituído e Temer precisa ser
designado por aquilo que é: um traidor da
Constituição e da Pátria. •

CARTA CAPITAL

 

Bolsonaro Is Getting Desperate, and It’s Clear What He Wantss

 

 

By Vanessa Barbara

For weeks, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has been urging his supporters to take to the streets. So on Sept. 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, I was half expecting to see mobs of armed people in yellow-and-green jerseys, some of them wearing furry hats and horns, storming the Supreme Court building — our very own imitation of the Capitol riot.

Fortunately, that was not what happened. (The crowds eventually went home, and no one tried to sit in the Supreme Court justices’ chairs.) But Brazilians were not spared chaos and consternation.

For Mr. Bolsonaro, it was a show of force. In the morning, addressing a crowd of around 400,000 people in Brasília, he said he intended to use the size of the crowd as an “ultimatum for everyone” in the three branches of government. In the afternoon, at a demonstration in São Paulo of 125,000 people, the president called the elections coming in 2022 “a farce” and said that he will no longer abide by rulings from one of the Supreme Court justices. “I’m letting the scoundrels know,” he bellowed, “I’ll never be imprisoned!”

It seems to be part of a plan. By picking a fight in particular with the Supreme Court — which has opened several investigations of him and his allies, including about his role in a potentially corrupt vaccine procurement scheme and his efforts to discredit Brazil’s voting system — Mr. Bolsonaro is attempting to sow the seeds of an institutional crisis, with a view to retaining power. On Sept. 9 he tried to back down a little, saying in a written statement that he “never intended to attack any branch of government.” But his actions are plain: He is effectively threatening a coup.

Perhaps that’s the only way out for Mr. Bolsonaro. (Apart from properly governing the country, something that apparently doesn’t interest him.) The antics of the president, struggling in the polls and menaced by the prospect of impeachment, are a sign of desperation. But that doesn’t mean they can’t succeed.

Mr. Bolsonaro has good reason to be desperate. The government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in the deaths of 587,000 Brazilians; the country faces record rates of unemployment and economic inequality; and it’s also afflicted by soaring inflation, poverty and hunger. Oh, and there’s a huge energy crisis on the way, too.

That has taken its toll on Mr. Bolsonaro’s standing with Brazilians. In July, his disapproval rating rose to 51 percent, its highest-ever mark, according to Datafolha Institute. And ahead of next year’s presidential elections, things are not looking rosy. In fact, polling suggests he’s going to lose. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the center-left politician and former president, is comfortably outstripping Mr. Bolsonaro. As things stand, Mr. Bolsonaro would lose to all possible rivals in a second-round runoff.

This explains Mr. Bolsonaro’s eagerness to push unfounded claims of fraud in Brazil’s electronic voting system. “There’s no way of proving whether the elections were rigged or not,” he said about past elections (including the one he won), during a two-hour TV broadcast in July, while failing to provide any evidence to support his allegations. He has repeatedly threatened to call off the elections if the current voting system remains in place — and although Congress recently rejected his proposal to require paper receipts, he continues to cast doubt on the voting process. (Sound familiar, anyone?)

Then there’s the corruption. A growing number of corruption accusations have been made against the president and two of his sons, who both hold public office. (One is a senator; the other sits on Rio de Janeiro’s City Council.) Prosecutors have suggested that the Bolsonaro family took part in a scheme known as “rachadinha,” which involves hiring close associates or family members as employees and then pocketing a portion of their salary.

For Mr. Bolsonaro, who was elected in part for his promise to rout out corruption, these investigations cast a long shadow. Against this backdrop of ineptitude and scandal, the events of Sept. 7 were an attempt to distract and divert attention — and, of course, to cement divisions.

Efforts to remove Mr. Bolsonaro by parliamentary means are stalled. Though the opposition has so far filed 137 impeachment requests, the process must be initiated by the speaker of the lower house, Arthur Lira, who does not seem inclined to accept them. (That’s not especially surprising: Mr. Lira is a leader of a cluster of center-right parties, known as the “centrão,” to whom Mr. Bolsonaro has handed out important government positions, in the hope of shielding himself from impeachment proceedings.) Only enormous public protests can break the impasse.

There’s no time to lose. The demonstrations last week were not simply political showmanship. They were yet another move to strengthen Mr. Bolsonaro’s position for an eventual power grab ahead of next year’s elections. He didn’t get exactly what he wanted — the numbers, though substantial, were far less than organizers hoped for — but he will keep trying.

Sept. 7 now marks another signal moment in Brazil’s history — when the totalitarian aims of our president became unmistakably clear. For our young democracy, it could be a matter of life or death.

 NEW YORK TIMES

 

 

 

For a Moment, the World Glimpsed the Truth of the US Occupation

 

By

Ali M. Latifi

Kabul—Throughout the last week of August, I was asked constantly about the situation outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. It’s all any TV station, radio, or podcast wanted to talk to me about. The grim images of devastation and desperation coming from there managed finally to gain the attention of people in the West, who for years had ignored the two-decade-long occupation, which was presumably launched for their safety. Or for Afghan women. Or for democracy.1

Or… something.2

People were fixated on the horrific images. Young men desperately clinging to a US military plane as it takes off. Taliban- and CIA-backed Afghan intelligence forces shooting round after round into the air to disburse hundreds of frantic men, women, and children. Thousands of families squatting in squalor in dirt fields outside the gates of the airport for days at a time.3

What they failed to see was that all these images were literal, physical embodiments of the failures of the past 20 years of foreign intervention in Afghanistan.4

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not according to the politicians and generals who beat the drums of war. “As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan,” George W. Bush said when he announced the launch of what the United States dared to call “Operation Enduring Freedom.”5

But freedom did not endure in Afghanistan. At least not the way it was supposed to.6

The past 20 years have been rife with allegations of electoral fraud, corruption, nepotism, human rights abuses, and targeted killings. The food, medicine, and supplies largely bypassed the most vulnerable members of Afghan society while kleptocrats and warlords filled their pockets and expanded their real estate portfolios.7

he progress that we did make has quickly dissipated since the government managed to lose more than two dozen provinces in the span of 11 days and former President Ashraf Ghani and his cronies, mostly unqualified dual-passport holders, fled the country, allowing the Taliban to walk into Kabul. Veteran Afghan journalists, artists, and entrepreneurs are now in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Shops and restaurants created by enterprising young Afghans have either been shuttered or are virtually empty.8

In an odd turn, the Westerners and the elites, who spent almost their entire existence in very specific bubbles of Kabul, are now screaming online, “Won’t somebody please think of the provinces?” People who for years excused or ignored the night raids, air strikes, drone attacks, and unlawful detentions carried out by foreign and Afghan forces are suddenly incensed that no one is covering potential abuses in rural areas.9

When the Afghan Air Force hit a madrassa in Kunduz in 2018, killing dozens of children, they reasoned it away, saying, “‘Collateral damage’ happens” or “Those children would have grown up to be Talibs anyway.”10

When the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital, also in Kunduz, was destroyed in 2015 by a US air strike, they said, “I heard Taliban were being treated in that hospital,” as if that were a justification for bombing a health facility.11

When the Trump administration dropped the so-called Mother of All Bombs on a village in Nangarhar, no one protested or bothered to ask why the world’s largest non-nuclear weapon was being used in a remote corner of eastern Afghanistan.12

But now the quality of life in Nangarhar and Kunduz matters to so many people on Twitter. Why? Because now those abuses are likely to be carried out by the Taliban, not by the people who were once signing the checks and divvying up the chairs in the Presidential Palace and various ministries. Not by the freedom-bringing forces of the US war machine.13

But, as all of this was going on, millions of Afghans were watching—when they weren’t being blown up by IEDs and drones. They watched as people stuffed ballots and ran off to the countries they came from when they fell under suspicion of corruption or when the Taliban got too close to their armored cars and their houses hidden behind concrete blast walls. They watched as the Taliban staged a bloody, vicious offensive on the Afghan land under the guise of fighting an occupation. And, most recently, they watched as the Taliban traipsed into city after city—Herat and Kandahar, and then14

Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad, and finally Kabul—and the people in power, who were supposed to defend and reassure them, kept quiet for 11 days. In all that time, none of Afghanistan’s “leaders” dared to utter the name of even one province that had fallen to the enemy the US had come to oust 20 years ago.15

The people saw their country crumble as fat cats screaming “Country or coffin!” scrambled to get Covid-19 tests and book tickets to Istanbul, Dubai, and New Delhi. As their flights took off, the territories continued to fall, and now there is radio silence from those people, who had spent hours breathlessly espousing the greatness of their republic on social media.16

That social media obsession had kept them from seeing the streets they whizzed passed in their armored cars on their way to their well-guarded homes or to the trashy parties with cheap alcohol, bad music, and shadily sourced drugs where they, the people running the country, hobnobbed, preferring to speak English and German in an effort to hide their marginal Pashto and Dari.17

They danced while villages burned.18

They drank while drought forced thousands from their homes.19

Then came the Taliban, with their guns in hand, and who was left? The Afghan people. The ones who saw little of the financial and political spoils of 20 years of occupation. The ones whose roads are lined with Taliban-planted IEDs and whose skies are riddled with drones delivering death from above.20

While the newly rich and fleetingly famous hightailed it out of Kabul, the poor were abandoned. Left to the Taliban. So they had little choice but to flock to the airport, clinging to any hope that they could make it out of the land where the elites and their American benefactors had managed to bring the Taliban back to the doorsteps of the people.21

Two decades ago, George W. Bush set out to oust the Taliban, claiming to bring freedom and democracy in their overthrow. Now, almost exactly 20 years later, democracy has withered under the weight of fraud and corruption, and the US is packing up its bags as the Taliban set down theirs in the Presidential Palace.22

The Nation

The War on Terror: 20 Years of Bloodshed and Delusion

 

By Tariq Ali

The Nation

The Taliban observed the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in startling fashion. Within a week of the United States’ announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Afghanistan on September 11, the Taliban had taken over large parts of the country, and on August 15, the capital city of Kabul fell. The speed was astonishing, the strategic acumen remarkable: a 20-year occupation rolled up in a week, as the puppet armies disintegrated. The puppet president hopped a helicopter to Uzbekistan, then a jet to the United Arab Emirates. It was a huge blow to the American empire and its underling states. No amount of spin can cover up this debacle.1

A little more than a year before the 9/11 attacks, Chalmers Johnson, the West Coast historian and onetime supporter of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and a CIA consultant to boot, published a prescient book titled Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. The book, which was virtually ignored when first published but later became a best seller, reads as both an eerie prologue and searing epitaph for the past 20 years. “Blowback,” as Johnson warned,2

is shorthand for saying that a nation reaps what it sows, even if it does not fully know or understand what it has sown. Given its wealth and power, the United States will be a prime recipient in the foreseeable future of all the more expectable forms of blowback, particularly terrorist attacks against Americans in and out of the armed forces anywhere on earth, including within the United States.3

Twenty-four hours after that blowback stunned the planet on 9/11, with sympathy messages pouring in from every capital—including Havana—the recently deceased war criminal Donald Rumsfeld declared at a meeting of the National Security Council that recalcitrant states, regardless of their involvement in 9/11, should pay the price. Accordingly, he suggested, “Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just Al Qaeda?” The next day, Paul Wolfowitz, the No. 2 at the Department of Defense, amplified this message by urging a “broad and sustained campaign” that would include “ending states who sponsor terrorism.” Within a week, the Great Decider himself, George W. Bush, had greenlighted an all-out war: “Let’s hit them hard. We want to signal this is a change from the past. We want to cause other countries like Syria and Iran to change their view.”4

Then the usual minions stepped in. Interviewed by David Remnick for The New Yorker, Dennis Ross, the US director of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” was insistent: “We can’t just do the usual thing—bomb a few targets, if it turns out to be Osama Bin Laden. If we respond the same old way, nothing will change.” Not to be outdone, the neocon Charles Krauthammer defended the invasion of Afghanistan two weeks later in his Washington Post column: “We are fighting because the bastards killed 5,000 [sic] of our people, and if we do not kill them, they are going to kill us again. This is a war of revenge and deterrence…. The liberationist talk must therefore be for foreign consumption.”5

Notably, these “bastards” and “enemies” did not include Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the two countries from which most of the 9/11 terrorists hailed. For years, wealthy Saudis had provided “fertile fund-raising ground” for Al Qaeda, according to none other than The 9/11 Commission Report. They had, in some cases, grown up with bin Laden, whose father was a habitué of their palaces and had founded the construction firm that built some of them. During an early NSC discussion, an attack on Iraq was considered, but Bush, Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney finally opted for a crude war of revenge against Afghanistan, where bin Laden and others in Al Qaeda’s leadership were lodged courtesy of the Taliban government, which itself had been maneuvered into place by the Pakistani military with the approval of the United States in 1994, several years after the Soviet Union withdrew its troops.6

The Taliban were quite prepared to hand over their guests to the United States, but they needed a fig leaf and asked politely for evidence, some proof of Al Qaeda’s involvement. The White House was in no mood for legal niceties. A short delay was permitted to enable Pakistan to withdraw its military personnel from Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom commenced in October 2001. The Taliban, on Pakistani military advice, mounted a paltry resistance. Their one-eyed leader, Mullah Omar, was last reported fleeing a central Afghan village on a motorbike, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. When US troops finally reached Al Qaeda’s hideout in the caves of Tora Bora, the leadership had fled. Both Omar and bin Laden, plus their crews, found refuge in Pakistan, where the country’s military leaders advised the Taliban to bide its time. The US and all its NATO allies, as well as Russia and China (good friends at the time), backed the war and the occupation of Afghanistan—the Russians, no doubt, with an element of schadenfreude.7

Twenty years later, the grim, bloody balance sheet of not responding “the same old way” speaks for itself. Six wars, millions killed, trillions wasted, and a plague of suffering and trauma inflicted on the Muslim world, accelerating a tidal wave of refugees that has created panic in the European Union and resulted in a huge increase of votes for far-right parties—which in turn has pushed an already extreme political center further to the right. Islamophobia, promoted by politicians of every stripe in the West, is now embedded in Western culture.8

“Oh may no more a foreign master’s rage / With wrongs yet legal, curse a future age!” wrote Alexander Pope at the dawn of the 18th century. Three hundred years later, the foreign master has withdrawn its forces, admitting defeat, with the full realization that the Taliban would soon be back in power. The war has been a huge political and military catastrophe for the US and its NATO camp followers. “Freedom” did not endure. The Taliban, which controlled three-quarters of the country on the eve of the US invasion, now control all of it.9

History is only modestly helpful for anticipating what happens next. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a weak pro-Moscow regime managed to hold on to Kabul for some years before it was toppled, with US support, and replaced by warring factions of the mujahideen. In 1994, the US gave the go-ahead to a Pakistani-led Taliban intervention. Two years later, the Taliban took over Kabul.10

The difference today is that there is no armed Cold War enemy as far as the US is concerned. The Taliban, once Washington’s friend, then an enemy, is now willing to be friends again. After all, the two have been talking for over a decade.11

Meanwhile, in July, a senior Taliban delegation visited China to pledge that Afghan soil would never again be used as a base to attack China and, no doubt, to discuss future trade and investment plans. Make no mistake, Beijing will replace Washington as the primary foreign influence in Afghanistan. Since China enjoys warm relations with Iran, we can hope that it will discourage rivalries between the minority Hazaras and the majority Pashtuns that might lead to bloodshed. Russia, for its part, will use its influence with other minorities to avoid the kind of civil war that broke out after the Soviet withdrawal. No outside power appears to want a repeat of that today. The US prefers to exercise direct control via drones and bombing raids, as it did a day after confirming the withdrawal from Afghanistan—to “buy time” for the Afghan government, we were informed—and as it did at least twice since the deadly ISIS-K airport attacks.12

Given that the Taliban has taken up residence in the presidential palace in Kabul, what the US should do, together with its NATO allies, is grant refuge and citizenship to all Afghans who want to leave the country: a tiny reparation for an unnecessary war. Apart from that, the US should leave the country well alone. Real change can come only from within Afghanistan. It will take time, but it’s better than an invasion by a major power. It’s too early to say how this will all pan out; we’ll know better in six months.13

“Precision” bombing: A man points out the remains of a pharmacy in Kandahar that was destroyed in a US air strike in October 2001.

On February 15, 2003, knowing what was next and harboring few illusions about their leaders, as many as 14 million people marched on all seven continents against the impending war in Iraq. Sanctions had already crippled the country, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children (as many as half a million, according to a 1995 Lancet analysis), a price that Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, had said was “worth paying.” The largest demonstrations were in Rome (2.5 million), Madrid (1.5 million), and London (1.5 million), while hundreds of thousands marched in New York and Los Angeles, along with huge assemblies in most state capitals.14

The largest gathering for peace ever seen in global history was ignored by Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and their cronies. Iraq was pulverized and its leader subjected to a judicial lynching. Torture by US soldiers (both men and women) was widespread, and triumphal rape pics were bandied about. For many, this was the face of Western civilization. At least half a million Iraqis died in the war. Baghdad’s museums were looted, and the social infrastructure of the country was devastated by bombing raids. These were war crimes, but they were “our” war crimes, and so they were ignored, disregarding the judgments at Nuremberg after the Second World War. In the War on Terror, it’s always open season: shoot to kill, no trials necessary, and indefinite imprisonment. Legal and moral values (“our way of life”) ceased to exist. Depleted uranium munitions were deployed in Iraq and, later, in Syria.15

Even before the war, of course, the United States had played fast and loose with international legal norms. The sanctions on Iraq—which were imposed in 1990, just before Bush I’s Gulf War, and remained until Bush II’s invasion—constituted a war crime on their own. The target was the civilian population; the goal was to incite a spontaneous popular uprising. A senior British civil servant, Carne Ross, testified before a parliamentary select committee in 2007 and admitted:16

The weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions caused massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis, particularly children. We, the US and UK governments, were the primary engineers and offenders of sanctions and were well aware of the evidence at the time but we largely ignored it and blamed it on the Saddam government….17

Real history moves deep within the memory of a people but is always an obstacle to imperial fantasists. There is now near-universal agreement that the Western occupation of Iraq was an unmitigated disaster—first for the people of Iraq, second for the soldiers sent by scoundrel politicians to die in a foreign land. The grammar of deceit utilized by Bush, Blair, and sundry neocon/neolib apologists to justify the war has lost all credibility. Despite the embedded journalists and nonstop propaganda, the bloody images refuse to go away; the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops was the only meaningful solution. While the US has supposedly withdrawn, its planes are used occasionally to bomb the country. A ghoulish reminder that if the Iraqi government misbehaves, punishments will be forthcoming.18

Masters of war: George W. Bush discusses PR strategy for the Iraq War with, from left, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell.

Libya, despite its vast oil wealth, was another story, but with its own grisly ending. Unlike the leaders of the Iraqi and Syrian Baath parties, Moammar Gadhafi had balked at constructing a proper social infrastructure, which would have gone a long way toward dissolving tribal loyalties. He had given up on his nuclear program in return for Western recognition and was feted in Western capitals. His son secured his PhD at the London School of Economics—notwithstanding claims of plagiarism—after which a generous donation was promptly bestowed on the school. He also reportedly provided funds for Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential campaign in France.19

Gadhafi’s vices, eccentricities, and more serious failings were on display in February 2011, during an Arab Spring–linked uprising. He thought his new friends in the West would back him. The opposite was the case: They had decided to get rid of him, and the opportunity offered itself. But the story told by military humanitarians to justify US intervention—that Gadhafi was bent on massacring his people—was based in large part on an Al Jazeera report that the Libyan Air Force was strafing demonstrators. This turned out to be a fiction, according to congressional testimony by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen. Nor were there indiscriminate, large-scale massacres in the cities of Misrata, Zawiya, and Ajdabiya when government forces retook them. Gadhafi’s warning on March 17 that his forces would show “no mercy” explicitly referred to the armed rebels in Benghazi, but he offered amnesty and an escape route to Egypt for those who laid down their weapons. Brutal though Gadhafi’s regime was, there is scant evidence that NATO’s bombardment prevented “genocide” or “another Rwanda” or, as President Obama put it, “a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”20

Unsurprisingly, there has never been a reliable accounting of civilians killed during the six-month bombing campaign. The more conservative estimates place the collective death toll—civilians, rebels, Gadhafi’s fighters—at around 8,000. But an academic from SOAS University of London, who had been advising the Foreign Office, placed the toll closer to 20,000 to 30,000 people. NATO’s planes did not protect civilians as they targeted Gadhafi’s forces. The dictator was captured, tortured, and mob-lynched. Ever sensitive, Hillary Clinton remarked, “We came. We saw. He died.” Pity. In other circumstances, Gadhafi might well have funded the Clinton Foundation.21

After the collapse of an absurdist pro-business neoliberal government—led initially by a Libyan exile in Alabama—post-Gadhafi Libya was taken over by a loose coalition of Islamist militias, including those linked to Al Qaeda. As in Iraq, the state had collapsed and a civil war commenced. Black Africans were expelled in large numbers and returned to their countries. Mali’s capital, Timbuktu, and much of the Sahel were taken over by “refugee militias.” The French sent in troops.22

Meanwhile, there were more terrorist attacks: in London, in Paris, in Mumbai, in Islamabad. The War on Terror had failed on every level—at home as well as abroad. While the US military and its allies bombed and droned their way across foreign lands, their governments were busy waging war on civil liberties on domestic soil. From Guantánamo to the maximum-security Communication Management Units in US prisons, from secret surveillance programs to Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, the United States has tracked and targeted its Muslim residents. Across the ocean, Britain launched its own sprawling “anti-terror” regime, including a program of indefinite detention within its state security prison, Belmarsh, where at least one prisoner was driven mad and transferred to Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital.23

Whistle-blowers who revealed the crimes in Iraq and elsewhere were severely punished. Chelsea Manning was pardoned, but Edward Snowden, who exposed the scale of the surveillance carried out by the National Security Agency, had to flee the country. And Julian Assange remains in Belmarsh prison, wondering whether the British judicial system will send him to be entombed in a US security prison on the basis of a dangerous, precedent-setting charge of violating the Espionage Act.24

Three months after Baghdad fell in 2003, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a speech at the White House congratulating Bush on the “impressive victory” but urging him not to stop. Forward to Damascus and Tehran: “It must be made clear…that their evil deeds cannot continue.”25

Those two capitals remain safe, but Syria is broken and Iran sanctioned. Where will freedom and democracy strike next?26

Bolsonaro late e os generais fazem negócios

Rafael Moro Martins

A caravana passou, com os cães latindo ao volante de caminhões, caminhonetes e (muitos) carros caros e (alguns) nem tanto, além de incontáveis motociclistas – tipos mal-encarados ao estilo Selvagens de Alphaville ou Demônios do Condomínio de Luxo – e muita gente a pé e em ônibus. Foi grande, não vou mentir: assisti da calçada, em Brasília, a um desfile que parecia interminável de gente disposta a derrubar a democracia em nome de um governo genocida e corrupto. 

Mas, para imaginar o que virá a seguir, convém deixar a parada de bolsonaristas e as missivas de lado e olhar para as figuras que levaram Bolsonaro ao Planalto, e que vêm chamando muito menos atenção do que deveriam: o tal do Partido Militar. Os generais da reserva que escoltaram o indisciplinado ex-capitão à Presidência e que se movimentam para se manterem no poder – e com poder – enquanto Bolsonaro se dedica a aterrorizar o país com a ameaça de um autogolpe. 

O que vai a seguir são informações recolhidas pelo boletim mensal com foco nas Forças Armadas brasileiras do Instituto Tricontinental que monitora a participação militar na política. O levantamento parte de informações públicas e é coordenado pela cientista social Ana Penido, também pesquisadora do Grupo de Estudos em Defesa e Segurança Internacional da Universidade Estadual Paulista, a Unesp. 

Enquanto Bolsonaro latia ameaças ao Supremo Tribunal Federal, o vice-presidente Hamilton Mourão, general de quatro estrelas da reserva, se embrenhou numa série de palestras em que se apresentou como a voz da ponderação do governo. Falou numa live fechada ao grupo Parlatório, um ajuntamento de empresários, economistas, gente do mercado financeiro e advogados que montou um grupo no WhatsApp. Abriu a Conferência Anual sobre Macroeconomia e Estratégia no Brasil do bancão Goldman Sachs. Também deu uma série de entrevistas, entre elas a Carlos Alberto Di Franco, um jornalista ligado ao Instituto Millenium e à organização católica ultraconservadora Opus Dei, simpático a extremistas de direita e colunista de jornais como O Globo e Estadão – do qual diz ser também consultor. 

Falando na imprensa, o ministro da Defesa, Walter Braga Netto, bateu um papo a portas fechadas com o jornalista Antônio Guerrero, vice-presidente de jornalismo da TV Record. A emissora da Igreja Universal, vale lembrar, recebe uma fatia generosa das verbas federais de publicidade. Talvez por isso, segue firme no apoio ao presidente. E Braga Netto subiu no palanque de onde no 7 de setembro Bolsonaro anunciou que não mais cumpriria decisões judiciais do STF.

Já que falamos de negócios: o general da reserva Luiz Eduardo Ramos, ministro-chefe da Secretaria-Geral da Presidência, recebeu em seu gabinete Alessandro Bruno Antunes Carvalho, diretor financeiro de uma startup mineira que afirma desenvolver "uma plataforma tecnológica envolvendo nióbio (uma obsessão de Bolsonaro) na preparação de nanomateriais avançados para soluções inovadoras em lifescience, energia e agronegócio". 

Ramos, tido como o mais bolsonarista dos ex-fardados do Planalto, recebeu o empresário acompanhado do general de divisão Luis Antônio Duizit Brito. Apesar de ser militar da ativa com salário de R$ 20 mil mensais líquidos, Duizit Brito ocupa cargo de nomeação política no Ministério da Defesa: é diretor de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação. É apenas um dos mais de 2 mil militares da ativa e mais de 600 da reserva com uma boquinha em 70 órgãos da administração federal. O general Brito tem um carguinho à toa, que lhe rende um acréscimo de R$ 2 mil ao contracheque. Mas nem sempre é assim. Joaquim Silva e Luna, presidente da Petrobras, embolsa R$ 230 mil mensais pelo trabalho na estatal, que se somam aos R$ 30 mil da aposentadoria paga a generais de quatro estrelas como ele. Nada mau.

Enquanto isso, o almirante Bento Albuquerque, ministro das Minas e Energia responsável pelas trapalhadas que aprofundaram a crise hídrica e energética do país (e que depois nos mandou tomar menos banhos), tratou de negócios com executivos da ExxonMobil e da Câmara Brasil-Texas de Comércio, mostra o relatório. Ele também recebeu empresários de Shell e Mitsubishi reunidos no consórcio Pátria Investimentos, já aquinhoado com um financiamento de R$ 2 bilhões do BNDES para construir a usina termoelétrica de Marlim Azul, em Macaé, estado do Rio. O tipo de negócio que a extinta Lava Jato adoraria esquadrinhar com lupa.

De volta a Mourão: ele e Tarcísio Gomes Freitas, capitão reformado e ministro da Infraestrutura, falaram ao Instituto Villas Bôas num evento chamado Projeto Nação 2035, uma baboseira tocada por militares da reserva. O principal deles é o general Eduardo Villas Bôas, que foi comandante geral do Exército até 2019 e autor do tweet que ameaçou o Supremo Tribunal Federal na véspera do julgamento de um habeas corpus de Lula, em 2018. Jair Bolsonaro já disse que foi Villas Bôas quem o elegeu presidente em outubro daquele ano. 

Também participa da história um tal Instituto Sagres, fundado por militares da reserva para ganhar dinheiro em Brasília e presidido pelo general da reserva Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva, assim como o presidente um  fã do torturador Brilhante Ustra. Já falei do tal Projeto Nação e de seus organizadores aqui, quando ficamos sabendo que o general Valério Stumpf Trindade, comandante militar do Sul, havia mandado que um subordinado distribuísse o questionário que vai embasá-lo – usando um e-mail oficial do Exército para isso.

Mas a Tatiana Dias, editora do Intercept em São Paulo, descobriu que Mourão incumbiu o ministro do Turismo, o mau sanfoneiro e lobista anti-indígena Gilson Machado, de “pedir” a seus funcionários que participassem da tal pesquisa produzida por Villas Bôas e seus amigos. As aspas são propositais: o ofício assinado por Mauro Fialho de Lima e Souza, assessor especial de Machado, é bem pouco sutil a respeito: a participação é voluntária, porém importante termos representatividade no Projeto (o grifo é do documento original).

Da lista de destinatários da mensagem, estão todos os órgãos públicos que, na esquizofrenia administrativa do governo Bolsonaro, acabaram sob o guarda-chuva do Turismo, inclusive as secretarias de Cultura, do Audiovisual, da Economia Criativa e Diversidade Cultural, de Fomento e Incentivo à Cultura, de Desenvolvimento Cultural e de Direitos Autorais e Propriedade Intelectual. Sim, é isso mesmo que você imaginou: servidores que deveriam cuidar do desenvolvimento da cultura brasileira sendo coagidos a dar trela a delírios de militares de pijama. Não à toa, a Cinemateca Brasileira ardeu em chamas.

Não foi a única anabolizada do governo no negócio de Villas Bôas. O instituto também promoveu um seminário sobre a "plataforma geopolítica da Amazônia e as ações estratégicas para a defesa dos interesses nacionais na questão ambiental", patrocinada pela gigante da comunicação governamental e corporativa FSB. Lá esteve, novamente, o vice-presidente Mourão.

Esse foi apenas mais um sobrevoo pelas últimas quatro semanas de ações  do grupo de oficiais do Exército que elegeu Bolsonaro. Enquanto o presidente brincava de fazer guerra com o STF, os generais, mais espertos, governavam e usavam a estrutura do governo para favorecer seus negócios privados. Porque, com ou sem Bolsonaro, o projeto dos militares é permanecer no poder. E, sem que os militares sejam colocados no devido lugar – os quartéis, para a maioria deles –, a democracia brasileira seguirá mambembe.