The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, affirmed this Thursday that the country would be a “republiqueta” without the 21 years of the military military dictatorship that emerged from the coup d’état of March 31, 1964. In the 58th anniversary of the coup against João Goulart, he reiterated his doubts about the process in which the re-election will take place on October 2, in a new challenge to the Electoral Justice.
“What would Brazil be without the works of the military government? It would be nothing, we would be a republic,” said the far-right president during a speech at the Planalto Palace to put seven new ministers into office as a result of the fact that a large part cabinet resigned to run to elective positions in the next elections. Bolsonaro insisted that a coup did not happen.
In the act in the Presidential Palace of Planato, deputy Daniel Silveira, famous for ripping up a poster in an act with the name of Marielle Franco, the councilwoman assassinated in Rio de Janeiro in 2018; and prosecuted for attacking democracy by Judge Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court. Silveira barricaded himself in Congress on Tuesday to avoid putting on an electronic anklet by order of the supreme court in a case for attacking democracy.
“Everyone had (during the dictatorship) the right to circulate, to come and go, to leave the country,” Bolsonaro said. The president said that the advisers ask him to calm down but that at some point he gets tired: “Calm down, shit“, he pointed out in the speech.
“We cannot accept what is happening passively. People who can be imprisoned, assets confiscated, wages withheld. You are going to get them. Today we have a president who fights for transparency in elections. They prohibited doubting the electronic ballot box. We have the obligation to have the certainty of the vote, which is the soul of democracy. If I don’t decide, everyone will suffer with it.”he added.
He also charged against his rival, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da SIlva. Bolsonaro launched a series of fake news used in the 2018 campaign linking the Workers’ Party with an alleged intention to tolerate pedophilia and teach sex education in kindergarten.
Rejection of the President of the Senate
For his part, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, recalled that the Constitution rejects “flirting” with authoritarian positions after the Ministry of Defense published a positive message alluding to the 1964 coup.
“The defense of democracy does not admit setbacks. The north of a Nation must always be strict obedience to its Constitution, forged in the desire to form a free country, whose content rejects flirtations, even if they are veiled, with authoritarian positions that harm freedoms,” Pacheco wrote on Twitter.
Signed by the Defense Minister, Walter Braga Netto, and by the commanders of the three military forces, the document highlights that “the movement of March 31, 1964 is a historical milestone in Brazilian political evolution, since it reflected the desires and aspirations of the population of the time”.
The text omits the word coup and repudiates other analyzes of the military dictatorship by saying that history cannot be “rewritten by mere revisionism” and recalls the civilian support for the coup, which the government of Jair Bolsonaro and the military, since 2019, once again called the “1964 movement.”
According to the Ministry of Defense, what happened in 1964 “led to a period of stabilization, security, economic growth and political maturity, which resulted in the restoration of peace, the strengthening of democracy and the rise of Brazil in the concert of nations”.
Lula’s message to the military
On Wednesday, during a meeting of the Puebla Group in Rio de Janeiro, Lula da Silva, the favorite in the polls to win the presidential elections in October, He asked the military to “stop sucking (Jair) Bolsonaro’s stockings”.
“In today’s Brazil there is no notion about the role of the military; the role of the military is not to suck the stockings of (President Jair) Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro is not the owner of the militarythey are part of an institution of the Brazilian people to defend us from external enemies, they don’t have to suck the socks off of either Lula or Bolsonaro,” said the former president.