Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/22/as-brazil-prepares-to-elect.html
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Remember when “move fast and break things” was something they bragged about?
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What really seems to have “got him there” was the self-destruction of the Workers Party and Operação Lava Jato.
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I’m sure he will be a responsible steward of that all-important planetary carbon sink and unparalleled biodiversity reserve, the AMAZON FREAKING JUNGLE.
We do live in the shittiest timeline, it’s true.
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Once they do that, will they also be making sure to close the barn door now that all the horses have left?
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It’s not really Facebook’s job to protect people from misinformation. But it’s also not their job to profit as a broadcast platform for misinformation campaigns.
I guess I’m a not going to win any popularity points with this, but at some point individuals are responsible for the government they elect.
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Do you know for sure he’s a “Brazilian Trump” or are you just echoing the “news” that PT is trying to sell around?
The saddest part of this election is seeing how many smart people, far away from Brazil and no knowledge about the country’s context, are being deceived from within.
I miss the time that news and journalism involved a good amount of research.
I miss the time when electing out and out fascists was unconscionable, even for the right.
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Many of us are going by his own words and opinions, that Bolsonaro himself is quite happy to make public. Sorry if that makes you sad.
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“Facebook said RFA created pages using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of clickbait intended to direct people to third-party websites.”
Too right, Facebook! How dare these people re-direct traffic to sites you don’t earn advertising revenue from! The tossers!
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Bolsonaro wants to return Brazil to the bad old days. He wishes the dictators killed more people, and promises mass killings if elected. It will be hard for Brazil to transition away from fascism again if it goes this route.
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You should know/let the record show that Bolsonaro is not just “the Brazilian Trump”. His actual political opinions are, unbelievably, much worse than Trump’s.
- Bolsonaro is a spiritual child of the military dictatorship 1964-86. He has always praised it highly.
- When voting for the impeachment of Dilma Roussef, he dedicated his vote to Carlos Brilhante Ustra, the infamous torturer and murderer who was personally responsible for the torture of Dilma Roussef when she was a young guerilla fighter.
- He has, however, repeatedly criticized the dictatorship for “only” torturing people and not killing them.
- In that connection, he has stated that he would have 20-30.000 people killed to make Brazil “governable”.
- He has also stated that if he gets elected president and can’t get his program through, he will call for military intervention.
- His vice president is a general who believes the transition to democracy was an error and has repeatedly threatened that the military might make a coup some day.
- He has stated that if he sees two men kissing in the street, he’ll beat them.
- He has stated that he’d rather his son died in an accident than turned out to be gay
- He has repeatedly trash-talked Afro-Brazilian and indigenous culture.
- In 30 years as a parlamentarian, he has hardly had any laws passed at all, ever.
- On the other hand, he has enriched his family tremendously. He’s as corrupt as they get.
The list is much longer, do you need to know more?
Trump is what he is, but Bolsonaro is an outright old-style fascist, and if he gets to be president, thousands of people will die.
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Well, he’s already promised to cut it all up and sell it abroad … right man in the right place, or something. 
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Exactly, he is no Trump. More like a Duterte.
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Yeah, I don’t get the Trump comparison when you have a perfectly good Duterte for that.
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Well that’s one election promise I’d love to go unfulfilled.
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Anyway, what can be expected if Bolsonaro wins?
Hard to say, but …his economical guru is Paulo Guedes, one of the most influential bankers and ultra-neoliberal economists in Brazil. Guedes was a part of the neoliberal shock team that devastated Chile after Pinochet’s coup. We’re likely to see very tough reforms and cuts indeed.
Bolsonaro is an ultra-hardline law and order guy - he wants to put a gun in every law-abiding Brazilian home, has promised the agro-business lobbies these guns to use again indigenous people and the MST, and during a massacre connected to a prison riot a couple of years ago he was disappointed the guards hadn’t killed more prisoners. His proposed solution to the gang violence in Rio de Janeiro is bombarding the favelas with leaflets giving everybody four hours to leave, after which the police would enter in force and kill everyone in sight.
So, a few scenarios:
- Universites will close, as funding is cut. Professors will be fired.
- Public schools will close all over the country, mainly in poor districts (Bolsonaro has proposed replacing primary school with long-distance learning to save money. Of course, this will never work, and many families don’t have computers or Internet anyway).
- There will be many more homeless people (this has already started, as everyone can see for themselves in cities like São Paulo or Belo Horizonte).
- Social programs like Bolsa Familia or Minha Casa, Minha Vida will be abolished, and as a consequence, there not only be more homeless people in the streets - there will be many more children in the street.
- All kinds of crime will be much worse - public insecurity will be much worse. And that’s saying something, Brazil is already one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
- Bolsonaro has promised to “end all activism in Brazil”. There will be a huge clampdown on all kinds of NGOs and social movements.
- Landowners in the countryside will, even more brazenly than is already happening, invade indigenous land, exploit it as they please and enjoy the official government policy of complete impunity.
- On the other hand, military and police will enjoy lavish increases in their funding, and the police will be encouraged to use more deadly violence than they already do (Brazilian police already kill about 5 times as many people as US police, in spite of a somewhat smaller population).
- Rich people and the largest corporations will enjoy lavish tax breaks.
- Brazil’s natural resources will be sold off to multinationals willing to give kickbacks. (This has already started under Temer).
All in all, such a result would imply a horrible reversal, and all of the very considerable progress Brazilian society has made since democracy was reintroduced in 1986 would be in danger of being rolled back.
And what is Brazil, then? Well, it’s one of the largest countries on Earth, with an extremely rich and diverse culture, and also one of the richest countries on Earth, even if that wealth is marred by a gaping inequality. And it’s the main guardian of the Amazon, one of the most important parts of the planet’s ecosystem.
If Bolsonaro becomes president of Brazil, it will be a global setback with consequences that could easily be worse even than the election of Trump in the US. It would be a disaster not just for Brazil and not just for those of us with friends and family in Brazil, but potentially for everyone - among other things, because of the precedent such a reversal would set.
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For a thorough discussion of this, see ex-Pink Floyd front figure Roger Waters discuss Brazil and the impending threat of Fascism with Caetano Veloso.
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