The coup in Brazil has already happened

Angela Merkel & Dilma Rousseff. Peter Hauser/Demotix. All rights reserved.The scene is that of a family dinner. The parents and the children are gathered around
the table for one of the most sacred moments in Brazilian family life.
But suddenly, there is no food in
the pans. The
plates disappear and they are left devastated. We then
turn to another room where bankers are shamelessly having a meal. The message is: this is
what will happen if Marina Silva wins the election. She will grant power to the banks, and this will
mean a return
to neoliberalism. This is just one example of Dilma Rousseff’s vicious campaign against the two main opposition
candidates. Lula’s heiress won
the election and gave the Workers Party (PT) its fourth consecutive
term at the helm of Brazil’s federal government.

A year after the campaign propaganda, the country is
going through a severe economic crisis, as shown by projections predicting a 2
percent fall in GDP in 2015. The dollar hovers around R$ 4.00, a historical record,
while inflation is close to 10
percent per year. The government has reacted with a fiscal
adjustment and cuts in pension payments, workers’ rights, public spending and
social services – which is exactly the same austerity prescription that Dilma
attributed to the opposition during the campaign. Joaquín Levy, the Minister of
Finance, is a Bradesco bank executive and a Chicago School monetarist
neoliberal. This is a serious crisis
but, to give just an example, the profits of Banco Itaú in 2015 have
grown by R$ 6 billion per quarter, which is a 25percent
increase in a year. In the same period, the
base interest rate
set by the government has risen four consecutive times, reaching 14.25 percent. In capitalism, the traditional response
to a crisis is to save the banks and socialize the losses.

What happened between the elections and Dilma’s
inauguration in January? Economist Márcio Pochmann, who is close to the PT, would
only say that “she
changed strategy”.  The
"strategy" of adopting a neoliberal
agenda, however, had already been outlined by former
minister Guido Mantega. The government knew that there was a crisis and was already planning a fiscal
squeeze for
the following year. So, the government lied twice during the election campaign. First, when it
denied that the economy was in trouble; second, when it attributed to
its opponents the very policies that the PT was to adopt
once the campaign was over. The government chose the lie
as a method, and won.

Early in 2015, there was no denying of the
economic crisis. Together with some truth about the crisis and the prescribed
remedies, the details of the "LavaJato" operation conducted by the
federal police and the judiciary were made public. The corruption scheme that
was unveiled involved Petrobras, large construction companies and politicians,
mainly from parties related to the government: the Brazilian Democratic
Movement Party (PMDB), the Progressive Party (PP) and the PT. Rather than exposing
the moral shortcomings of those involved, "LavaJato" laid bare the
workings of a structurally corrupt governance system at the core of the
developmentalist economic project which had been operating for years. Funds
intended for workers and oil prospecting were used again and again, through the
public investment bank (BNDES), to establish oligopolies in key sectors of the
economy. These oligopolistic "national champions" then received
unconditional political support from the government to compete in the
international market, obviating the costs for Brazil’s internal development and
giving these companies a free hand to plunder both workers and the environment.

End of the happy party

The happy party ended at the beginning of 2015. When
people became aware, simultaneously, of
the economic failure of the developmentalist
project, of the fact that the population would have to foot
the bill, and that the government parties were directly involved in the
corruption scheme, Dilma Rousseff’s approval ratings plummeted. Today
her popularity is
less than the inflation rate, which is even less than the approval rate of Fernando Collor de Mello on the eve of his impeachment in 1992. As a result, the anti-corruption
movement was further strengthened. Using social media to self-convene in a "polycentric" way, it brought
millions onto the streets on three occasions:
in March, April and August. Across the country, the indignant marches exceeded by a
ratio of 10:1 the counter-demonstrations organized by the government forces.

In this situation, the Brazilian Left
has been unable to give a powerful response to the crisis. Instead of focusing
criticism on development and governance policies carried out by the government,
it has chosen to put in evidence the conservative tenor of the current
Brazilian Congress and the unprecedented reactionary social progression.
The perception within the Left is thus that, in spite of it all, Dilma’s
government is still more to the Left than Congress and Brazilian society. So,
evaluations to the effect that Dilma’s government is not as leftist as it
should, subtly end up defending it. This was the logic behind the Left’s "critical
vote" for the continuity of the government as a lesser evil –by
comparison, that is, to the alternative scenario: a full-fledged neoliberal restoration.
This logic still currently applies. At bottom, the government needs to be leftist
just enough to be to the Left of Congress and society in general.

Such a strategy, which is aimed at maintaining
internal cohesion, derives from an aggressive campaign by the pro-government
media to show how the main problem lies in Congress and in society itself. This
is propaganda of the type “rightism equals exploitation” which has split into
two campaigns: Fora Cunha (Cunha Out)
against Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of the lower house of Congress, and the
disqualification of the 2015 protest cycle allegedly for its rightist bias. No importance
is given to the uncomfortable fact that former president Lula himself acted
politically to save Cunha and his PMDB
allies.

The tragedy, however, is not
that the Right is benefitting from the crisis, but that
citizen discontent is converging against
the Left, due to the latter’s almost congenital inability
to distance itself from the PT and the
government.

From protesters to terrorists

In June 2013, a massive protest, quantitatively
similar to the 2015 demonstrations, took to the streets and raided the social
media. Qualitatively, however, it was distinctly different from the current
protests in several ways. The protests that took place two years ago, within
the context of the Arab Spring, the European 15M, the Occupy Movement and the
Gezi Park protests were much more than a movement against corruption, in that
their agenda included public transportation, housing, and the transformation of
political institutions. Protesters were fighting, in short, to deepen the
post-dictatorship democratic transition regime. There was in fact the
possibility to alter the power balance and to change the course of the
political and economic projects. But both the PT government and most of the
Left despised these protests, which they considered to be a “proto-fascist
broth”, thus contributing to build up a repressive consensus which was to make
a brutal descent onto activists and the movement a few months later.

The massive demonstrations did not result in any
institutional changes, thus accelerating the widespread disenchantment with politics and politicians. Some in the Brazilian Right saw the
2013 social expression as an act of vandalism and organized
crime. But the Left also joined
in, with an added accusation: the intervention of fascist
groups, manipulated by the
CIA.

Today the government forces protest against the golpismo (putschism) that some in the
opposition are dreaming of. But it
is worth putting this
alibi, which has been repeatedly used since the 2005 Mensalão scandal, into historical perspective. In August
2013, after the high tide of the
protests, Dilma signed the Criminal
Organizations Law. This law
created a new category, “crime by association”, which was used immediately to investigate and arrest militant and
human rights groups. Only in
Rio de Janeiro, between
2013 and the end of the 2014
World Cup, 72 such groups were criminalized. The law also affected unions and Left opposition politicians.

In addition to this, the government in
recent years has authorized military interventions in the favelas, underpinning the policy of "military
pacification" inspired by the Medellín and Gaza models, which was already
being enforced by its PMDB allies in the state of Rio. At the same time, the
government did nothing regarding the continuing practice of the autos de resistência (resistance
proceedings), a kind of safe-conduct granted to the police for carrying out
summary executions which contributes to camouflage the number of murders and
disappearances. In case of death of a suspect, the auto de resistência resolves the situation with a simple statement by
the police assuring that the death occurred in conflict, so that further
investigation into the circumstances is unnecessary. The repeal of this dismal
practice was another of Dilma’s unfulfilled campaign promises in 2014, which naturally
antagonized the
human rights movements.

To complete the picture, in 2015 Dilma presented Congress with the first anti-terrorism law of
Brazil, a country that has never historically
suffered from this kind of activity. The bill was taken to parliament
for urgent
processing, so that it can be in force during the Olympic Games of 2016 – at which time the
crisis will probably be even more
entrenched. In a way, the coup in Brazil has already happened.

The need of a breakthrough

Against this
background, the Left prefers to mobilize against Dilma’s impeachment (which they
call a "coup") and to systematically
ridicule the street protests which,
with the worsening of the crisis and the
deepening of the "LavaJato" investigation,
will no doubt increase in number and
intensity. The solution is now an
idealized "exit on the Left,"
as if there was an ideological door through which one could simply escape – there is not. As in 2013, the
solution can only be worked out through struggles aiming at opening a gap in the existing situation.
But today, thanks to the repression that
the government itself sanctioned in
2013/2014, things are notably more
difficult for the new movements.

The solution needed will
have to be carved out of the rising tide of indignation that feeds on the global “anti-political” trend and the anti-corruption movement. These movements should not be denied offhand. We need a forward-looking
vision of these forces. But
you cannot do this by simply taking to
the streets carrying banners and
red flags, as
the Left is fond of doing.

Only a
breakthrough in the political and organizational fields, taking advantage of the trends and
the surge of a society in motion,
will allow us to imagine a way out of
the crisis, beyond the fiscal adjustments and the false polarizations in which we
now find ourselves trapped.