Under Bolsonaro's government: 1,000 days of lies and one truth

With a devastated economy, which only benefited the financial sectors and the large estates, Brazil has a disastrous performance in all social areas. In addition, the unemployment rate has reached 14.6%, reaching almost 15 million Brazilians. And this is the only truth of these thousand days: Brazil is once again on the hunger map.

On September 27, 2021, Jair Bolsonaro served a thousand days in the executive branch. In this short article we will highlight two important aspects that are structural in his trajectory: the militia president and the false president. In fact, both are a structural part of Bolsonaro's presidency.

Who is Jair Bolsonaro?

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Bolsonaro is an undemocratic politician. It has grown from underrepresentation, stitched together by a web of relationships that oscillate between the institutional world and the world of crime. In almost 30 years as a legislator, he only had one bill that became law. On the other hand, he always worked to increase his own wealth and that of his family.

A distinctive feature is the low commitment to the public interest and social welfare. Bolsonaro has built his political image as the outsider, whose struggle against anything that resembles democracy means the affirmation of a social and authoritarian order.

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This position is presented in its political language under the banners of "freedom above life", "the traditional family" and "God above all". Emblems of an order that is not built with egalitarian words, but with force - of arms, or of magical-religious discourse. His construction as a politician took place in the representation of what remains in the shadow, of hatred. Sectors that have always existed in democracies and that would hardly be channeled by it.

Therefore, a tragic aspect for Brazilian democracy is the militia ideology that drives its logic and actions. It is the belief that there is no other instrument for the construction of order than the power to kill and that any legal limit to this power must be rejected as a threat to that order.

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This ideology thinks about politics through the logic of criminal organizations. The underground agreements with private sectors and the looting of the public machine are recurrent in the investigations of the press and the control organizations on the Bolsonaro government.

Two episodes express this clearly. The first were the anti-democratic demonstrations that Bolsonaro promoted on September 7, 2021, whose main agenda was the closure of the Supreme Federal Court (STF). The infrastructure and mobilization tools for these demonstrations were financed by sectors of the business community and agribusiness that have shady relationships with the president, his family, and his allies. The choice of the STF as a target is explained by its action in defense of democracy, setting limits to the constant deviations in the way of acting of the president.

The second episode was revealed by the Parliamentary Investigation Commission (CPI) of the Federal Senate, which investigates the actions of the Federal Government on the pandemic. The ICC investigations showed that Bolsonaro promoted a policy of spreading the virus, having as a strategy the commitment to herd immunity and the adoption of the so-called “early treatment” with ineffective drugs for the treatment of COVID-19.

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The ICC also revealed that this policy was practiced through an agreement involving private health companies, the Ministry of Health, the Federal Council of Medicine and some businessmen from other sectors that formed, according to the ICC senators, a "parallel cabinet "Or" cabinet in the shade. "

In this process, a private health company that was part of the “parallel cabinet” promoted clandestine studies in humans, with eugenic practices, to test the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and other drugs that were part of the so-called “covid kit”.

Bolsonaro, his family and his cronies from business and crime occupy Brasilia as an invading force. The anti-democratic forces of the 21st century do not always operate with tanks in the street. Digital militias, the rhetoric of destruction, militia ideology, the military in offices, and business collusion hijack democracies.

A fake president and Brazil's return to the hunger map

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Bolsonaro's position, from the beginning, was false. He was a military man who walked out the back door, but he acts like he was a successful military man. Fake.

As a legislator he was always false. Nobody took it seriously. Specifically, he did nothing beyond stealing public funds, as indicated by the accusations about the plots of ghost employees in his office and that of his children.

The presidential campaign was bogus. There was no debate, but many media outlets trying to mask the uncivilized beast, which was the spearhead of the economic elites and the military eager to return to power.

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In the 1,000-day trajectory, in the image and likeness of the Trump experience, a fake news structure was created from the center of power to maintain and guide his government. Since his inauguration, as the Aos Fatos portal survey shows, the president has told 3,989 falsehoods and misrepresentations, almost four lies per day in office. A flesh and blood Pinocchio. The president spoke little of any public policy that was not an offense to some sector of society or some institution of democracy.

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The fake news mobilized a mass that became the segment of society his government led, 20% of the electorate. Thus, Brazil saw how the president attacked all those who were not aligned with these fanatical and misinformed sectors on purpose. Universities became from the beginning one of its priority objectives: spaces of diversity and the search for truth, constitute, by definition, a threat to lies as a form of government.

At the last General Assembly of the United Nations, the president's speech was addressed to his fanatic sector, forgetting that the whole world was listening. His speech was structured based on lies and misinformation, showing how much he despises democracy and society itself. Far from the typical obligations of presidents, Bolsonaro has more to do with an administrator of a WhatsApp group than with a statesman who directs the course of one of the largest countries on the planet. A country with great importance in the region, where, years ago, it set the course for the Southern Cone.

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But what cannot be hidden by fake news is hunger (and food insecurity) that affects more than 116 million Brazilians. With a devastated economy, which only benefited the financial sectors and the large estates, Brazil has a disastrous performance in all social areas. In addition, the unemployment rate has reached 14.6%, reaching almost 15 million Brazilians. And this is the only truth of these thousand days: Brazil is once again on the hunger map.

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*www.latinoamerica21.com, a plural medium committed to the dissemination of critical and truthful information about Latin America. Follow us on @Latinoamerica21

Andrés del Río is a political scientist and professor of Political Science at the Fluminense Federal University. PhD from the Rio de Janeiro State University (IESP-UERJ). Head of the Department of Geography and Public Policies DGP-IEAR-UFF.

André Rodrigues is political scientist, doctor in Political Science from the IESP / UERJ and professor at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF).

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