Sao Paulo, Brazil
It reads like science fiction. In 93 pages, the text outlines a strange future. In 2027, there is a new pandemic, caused by the “Xvirus”. A year later, war breaks out between the US and both China and Russia over bauxite deposits in Guyana.
By 2035, Brazilians admit their innate conservatism and embrace a future in which the word “indigenous” barely exists.
But these predictions aren’t from some work of fiction: They come from a bizarre policy paper released last year by a group of institutes run by retired Brazilian military personnel.
Entitled “Nation Project: Brazil in 2035”, the report proposes a grand national strategy on issues such as geopolitics, science, technology, education and health.
Along with his most bizarre predictions, he predicts the end of the universal public health system and the country’s public universities, among others.
It’s tempting to laugh, but this wasn’t a side issue. The presentation of the plan last year was attended by the Vice President of Brazil and the Secretary General of the Ministry of Defense.
After all, this is Brazil, where the Army has long meddled in the government — and it ruled the country in a dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
In the decades since then, the Army has returned to the barracks, but its withdrawal has always been conditional. The Presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a former military captain, brought the armed forces back to the heart of the Government.
Bolsonaro may have reluctantly left office, but the Brazilian Army continues to be a constant threat to the country’s democracy.
At the core of the power of the military is amnesia. During the dictatorship, the regime murdered hundreds and tortured 20,000 people.
But in 1979, he passed an amnesty law for those who had committed politically motivated crimes in the previous two decades, covering not only exiled activists, but also military officers and public officials accused of murder, torture and sexual abuse.
The law was ratified in 2010 by the Supreme Court. Four years later, a National Truth Commission identified 377 public officials responsible for human rights abuses during the dictatorship, but little was done. No military officer has been punished for their crimes.
Today, there are still many people who praise the country’s military past. As a Bolsonaro supporter assured me recently, the regime “had not massacred ordinary people.”
In Brazil, supporters of the dictatorship portray the crimes of the “other side”—the leftist guerrilla groups that opposed the regime—as if their acts were of the same magnitude as the atrocities committed by state forces.
However, it is impossible to defend officers who tortured pregnant women and arrested young children, calling them terrorists and threats to national security.
The Brazilian Army has never apologized for its crimes. On the contrary, it still celebrates what it calls “the 1964 revolution.” During the Bolsonaro government, he celebrated March 31 — the date of the coup that brought the army to power — every year.
However, the problem goes back much further back, to the very foundation of the Country. The republic was established by a military coup in 1889. “The military officers,” as the Brazilian lawyer Heraclito Sobral Pinto once put it, “never accepted that they were not the owners of the republic.”
In the 130 years since then, military forces have loomed over Brazil—as political scientist Adam Przeworski wrote, referring to democracies beset by arrogant armies—“like menacing shadows, ready to fall on anyone who goes too far in undermining their values.” and their interests.
And those interests are considerable. With no war in sight, Brazil has the fifteenth largest permanent army in the world, with 351,000 active members, 167,000 inactive officers and 233,400 pensioners, according to the Transparency Portal.
In terms of payroll, the government spends more on defense than on education—and almost five times more than on health.
Military officers enjoy many privileges, with their own systems of education, housing, health care, and even criminal justice. Revealingly, they were exempted from Brazil’s recent pension reform. Lucky for them: In 2019, the average pay for a retired member of the military was more than six times that of a retired civilian.
It’s not just military officers who benefit from such generosity, but their families as well. For example, 137,900 unmarried daughters of military members will receive their father’s pension for the rest of their lives — a list that includes two daughters of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who was accused of torturing hundreds of people and retired with the rank of marshal.
After Bolsonaro became President in 2019, the Army flooded the civil administration. In 2020, 6,157 military officers — half of them on active duty — worked for the federal government, more than double the number in 2018.
At some point, 11 of the 26 ministers in the Bolsonaro government were official or former officials, among them the Minister of Health in most of the pandemic, General Eduardo Pazuello, who has not been held accountable for his misdeeds.
The President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has tried to gradually withdraw military personnel from the government — especially after the January 8 insurrection, in which the Army played a shadowy role. If the Army did not participate in the riots, it definitely did not do much to prevent it.
In January, Lula fired the army chief, who allegedly sheltered pro-Bolsonaro rioters at a camp in Brasilia the night of the attacks.
Encouragingly, a Supreme Court judge has ruled that military officers involved in the riots will be prosecuted in civilian court.
It is a start, but there is still a long way to go before we can be free of the Army’s shadow.
By: INTELLIGENCE/Vanessa Barbara
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6605385, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-10 16:00:07
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