Since the 1960s, with street uprisings in Paris, Mexico City and dozens of cities around the world —including many in the United States against the Vietnam War—, the left cornered the governments of the center and the right and promoted political changes . But above all, he took it for granted that the squares and avenues were an essential part of his proselytizing patrimony. “Winning the street” thus became the motto of the left.
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More than half a century later, the left continues to fight in public spaces, as happened at the beginning of this decade in Chile and Colombia. But now, the right has come out to dispute that field. And as has happened many times with leftist protests, in addition to marches, the rightists have resorted to violence, as a year ago in Washington, when the trumpists stormed the Capitol or this Sunday in Brasilia, where the Bolsonaristas did the same.
(Furthermore: Brazil: They release about 600 suspects involved in the coup attempt)
Thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist defeated in late October by leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, turned sit-ins and sit-ins that had been going on for several days on Sunday into an assault on the most emblematic public buildings in the Brazilian capital : the Nereu Ramos palace, seat of the Congress; the Planalto Palace, seat of the Presidency, and the STF building, seat of the Federal Supreme Court.
These are three emblematic modernist constructions of Brasilia designed in the 1950s by the architect Óscar Niemeyer —himself a declared Marxist—, and which frame the Plaza de los Tres Poderes. After breaking through the weak security barriers, marchers dressed in the colors of the national flag climbed up its ramps and, armed with sticks, stones and firecrackers, broke windows, smashed doors and, above all, seriously damaged the image of Brazilian democracy.
(Keep reading: They confirm that former President Jair Bolsonaro was admitted to a US hospital.)
The newly inaugurated President Lula was not in the capital, but in a matter of hours, his government evicted the assailants and arrested more than a thousand of them, who will now pass into the hands of the judges. Although the attack was quickly brought under control, the general feeling is that Brazil remains polarized. Lula is facing very difficult days.
legitimacy crisis
One of the first to react was Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel: “We strongly condemn violent and anti-democratic acts (…) that seek to generate chaos and disrespect the popular will,” he said on his Twitter account. The declaration would be valid if it did not come from a ruler whose mandate is not the result of the popular will and whose regime lacks democratic legitimacy.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro followed the same line, condemning “Bolsonaro’s neo-fascist groups that have assaulted Brazil’s democratic institutions.” Again, references to democracy lose value as they come from a president with zero credentials in that field.
(Also read: Brazil: new police chief says he will not tolerate anti-democratic acts)
“Fascism decides to carry out a coup,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in his first reaction. Meanwhile, his friend the Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, judged the actions of the Bolsonaristas as “unacceptable.” Meeting on Monday afternoon in Santiago de Chile, Petro and Boric severely censured the use of violence by the followers of former President Bolsonaro.
And although the leftists Petro and Boric have more democratic credentials than Díaz-Canel and Maduro, their recent decisions put them before a contradiction in fact: it is not credible to condemn the violence of the protesters of the right, days after having pardoned some of the most violent marchers on the left who staged very serious riots, with a balance of deaths and injuries, in the protests of 2019 and 2020 in Chile, and of 2020 and 2021 in Colombia.
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Indeed, on December 31, Boric pardoned 12 defendants for their actions in the protests against the government of Sebastián Piñera. Among those pardoned, some had long criminal records and, in the marches, carried out attacks that bordered on terrorism.
As for Petro, for a few days he has been ordering the controversial release of members of the group known as Primera Línea, which carried out violent attacks that caused serious injuries and even deaths among civilians and police officers.
The person in charge of reminding him was the Argentine deputy Javier Milei, a controversial right-wing populist who leads several presidential polls. “With what legitimacy,” he asked, “can Gustavo Petro and Gabriel Boric complain about the violence in Brazil, if they were the main instigators of the vandalism protests in Chile and Colombia and, not content with it, they pardoned those responsible?” sued.
(Also: OAS convenes extraordinary meeting for ‘undemocratic’ acts in Brazil)
Combine ways of fighting
The discussion that Milei raises is not new. It has accompanied the political debate between left and right since the time of the French revolution, when it is assumed that these concepts were born, due to the location of the different forces in the Constituent Assembly of 1789. To the right of the stands the most conservative and to the left the most radical.
After the end of the French monarchy, this political system, which on many occasions had resorted to repressive violence, was replaced by the republican government of the Directory, which soon unleashed a wave of terror whose symbol was the guillotine. Not only King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, passed through it, but also another 16,000 people sentenced in especially arbitrary summary proceedings.
(Also read: Similarities and differences between what happened in Brasilia and the assault on the Capitol)
The 19th century was marked by the alternate use of peaceful popular uprisings, with the resort to violence, the same with the armies that liberated Latin America from Spain, with terrorist attacks as occurred in Western Europe and even in Russia. The Marxists gave the matter the proper framework of political praxis, baptizing it as “the combination of forms of struggle.”
There is no coincidence in politics, the acts (in Brasilia) are clearly inspired by the invasion of the Capitol.
In the first half of the 20th century, the left lost its monopoly in this field for the first time. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Italian fascists and the German Nazis made popular mobilizations (the march on Rome that brought Benito Mussolini to the government, or in Germany the parades in neat uniforms and marches with torches) an instrument of pressure. to access power.
And, of course, they combined these demonstrations with a profusion of violent actions by paramilitary groups that acted against those who opposed them, or against the minorities they blamed for all the evils, as happened with the Jews, the communists or homosexuals.
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Nothing very different from what the Bolsheviks had done in Russia a few years before, which just as they filled seats for the speeches of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, Lenin, and competed in the elections when the fall of the tsarist regime allowed them, they also assaulted public buildings: once in power, they unleashed a brutal crackdown that lasted seven decades and killed tens of millions. Neither Lenin nor Hitler ever won an absolute majority in parliament, and it was the threat of violence or the open resort to it that allowed them to seize power.
unfinished battle
The assault this Sunday by the Bolsonaristas on public buildings in Brasilia coincided with the first anniversary of the attack by the hordes of Trumpismo on the Capitol in Washington. In this regard, Bruna Santos, director of the Brazil Institute attached to the famous Wilson Center, told Monday Miami Herald: “There is no coincidence in politics, the acts (in Brasilia) are clearly inspired by the invasion of the Capitol.”
And it is that despite facing judicial processes for having instigated the assault on the Capitol from the White House, and having suffered a drop of several points in the support of opinion, former President Donald Trump continues to play in the American political pulse.
(Also read: Brazil investigates security flaws that allowed attacks on seats of power)
Of course, there seem to be some more extreme than Trump himself. These are the twenty congressmen who kept the presidency of the House of Representatives in suspense for a week, forcing the moderate Republican majorities to commit to a tough legislative agenda that includes even investigating President Joe Biden..
Although Trump himself tried to incite them to vote in favor of Kevin McCarthy —who was finally elected— part of the Republican bench made up of Trumpists and right-wing populists did not give in, creating an unprecedented event since the end of the War. civilian in that country. And although Biden’s Democrats won the Senate, the opposition majority in the House is going to put the current occupant of the White House in serious trouble.
And something similar is going to happen in Brazil. From Miami, former President Bolsonaro condemned, with some timidity, the attacks by his followers on the seats of power in Brasilia. And now that hundreds are in jail, someone might naively think that Lula has come out stronger. But the truth is that an ordeal awaits the Brazilian president, because while he won the presidential elections from Bolsonaro by a fairly narrow margin, the right wing kept the majority in Congress.
(See also: Photos: this is how buildings of power remained in Brazil after the Bolsonarista attack)
And there will be played a second round of the assault on the power of the Bolsonaristas, in the same way that the United States House of Representatives will host a new chapter of the assault on the Capitol a year ago. All this because, the same on the left as on the right, in the middle of the 21st century, the combination of the forms of struggle, however condemnable it may be, is still valid.
Mauricio Vargas Linares
For the time*[email protected]
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