Coup in Brazil: The Farce Is Consummated, Now the Struggle Continues
Originally from El Boletín Tricontinental Newsletter published by OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa & Latin America) No. 14/2016 5 September 2016
August 31, 2016 will be written in the dark pages of Latin American and Caribbean history as day in which a corrupt and delegitimized Parliament bypassed the vote of more than 54 thousand Brazilian men and women. The aim: putting Brazil under the geopolitical control of the United States and applying a brutal adjustment against the people, at the service of large corporations.
In the name of democracy and an alleged fight against corruption, with a little help from the private mass media, the most corrupt and anti-democratic politicians have managed to overthrow legitimately-elected President Dilma Rousseff, even without being able to prove the corruption accusations that weigh on her. However, during the process, we have seen the brutality that the most conservative sectors are capable of in order to take over power once again.
With the voting in the Senate the coup against the Brazilian democracy was materialized. They destroyed the electoral result, condemning an innocent woman and crowning the greatest political setback since the military coup in 1964.
This rupture of the constitutional order expresses the unpatriotic and unpopular aims of the economic elites, engaged in privatizing Pre-salt fields, state companies, and public Banks, apart from selling the lands to foreign capital, putting at risk the national production of food and water control. Coupist leaders want, among other things, to reduce the investments in health, education and housing, eliminating labour rights, ending with the relation between basic pensions to minimum wage, burying the agrarian reform and emptying social programs.
This goes hand in hand with the reactivation of the process towards the creation of the Pacific Alliance, that is to say, towards Free Trade Agreements at the service of transnationals and military cooperation with the United States.
As we have warned in the past, this was a very important step due to its geopolitical weight in the offensive against the development of the integration between the countries of Our America. This process of integration has dawned with the beginning of the XXI century, promoting the struggles of the peoples all over the continent, fighting against imperialism in every country and coordinating efforts to create stronger bonds between nations and peoples.
“Our struggle against the coup and their plan to strip us from our conquests will be ruthless (…) Today, the resistance is merely beginning. On the streets and inside institutions. In education centers, workplaces and households. Sooner than the usurpers think, the Brazilian people will be able to reject their plans and retake the road of great changes”, pointed out the communiqué of Brazil’s Popular Front, a space for coordination that is made up of several organizations that are also part of ALBA Movimientos in Brazil.
From the Continental Articulation of Movements towards ALBA, we echo these words; we reject the Coup and commit to continue building, in every country, more unity, organization and mobilization, with the aim of retaking the historical process of a Great Homeland, a Patria Grande,which is free, just and sovereign for the people of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Statement from the Continental Articulation of Movements towards the ALBA
Another Coup in Our America
Statement of networks and social movements calling to the Continental Journey for Democracy and against Neoliberalism next November 4, 2016
Aware of the policies that attempt against our peoples, our sovereignty, our self-determination and regional integration, we, the movements, organizations and spaces with diverse forms of resistance join together in the “Continental Journey for Democracy and against Neoliberalism”, denounce the coup that has just concluded in Brazil, preceded by an extensive farce disguised as institutionalism.
We state that a judicial, legislative and media coup took place in Brazil showing the patriarchal domination of the large enterprises, the effects of which, in addition to violating democracy and the political rights of Brazilians, benefit the international and local economic elites. The government of Michel Temer and the putsches’ sectors are instruments of the financial capital, the agricultural businesses, and the multinationals, main beneficiaries of the economic opening, privatizations and handing over of common property.
This procedure already initiated by the illegitimate government in May, when the impeachment process was opened, implements the program defeated in the October 2014 elections by the votes of 54 million people who supported Dilma Rousseff. Now, however, it is defended by a handful of parties that want to rule giving their backs to the people. The consequences of this situation will be suffered by the historically most vulnerable sectors: peasants, workers, African descendants, indigenous peoples, women, children and old age people.
This coup is part of the strategy to break the regional integration mechanisms such as CELAC, UNASUR and MERCOSUR – the latter having received a blow with the refusal from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay to recognize Venezuela’s right to take over the temporary presidency – as we denounced a few weeks ago. Again we take sides in solidarity with the Venezuelan people, who continue to resist the attacks of imperialism and rightist forces in the continent.
From November 2015 to date, different movements, networks, organizations and spaces have been meeting to celebrate the defeat of ALCA in 2005 and analyze the upcoming challenges. Already then we foresaw this advance of the right, articulated in the continent, and the radicalization of its neoliberal platform in the region as part of a world strategy. We were not mistaken in our diagnosis or in warning on the need to struggle in unity and strengthen our integration. To act from the peoples and for the peoples. That is why, having come together in Montevideo this 1st day of September of 2016 to consolidate the Journey against Neoliberalism and in favor of Democracy, we express our solidarity with the Brazilian people and their social movements, and condemn the coup against President Dilma Rousseff, which is aimed at our entire America.
From this articulation of unity and struggle of the popular social movements, we will remain alert against the neocolonial advances against integration and the rights of the peoples. In this regard we invite the remaining movements and popular organizations to join in the construction of a great Continental Journey for Democracy and against Neoliberalism next November 4, 2016.
Not One Step Backwards! We, the people, continue to struggle for our integration, self-determination and sovereignty, against free trade and multinationals!
Montevideo, September 1, 2016
Coup against democracy in Brazil
Communiqué of the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity for the Peoples
August 31, 2016 will remain as the day of shame against the Constitution of the Republic of Brazil, with the fraudulent violation of the will of 54 million Brazilians who confirmed with their vote only two years ago the reelection of the legitimate President Dilma Rousseff.
The brutal attack to Dilma’s government is a direct attack to democracy in Brazil and to the stability and unity of the region. It is a continuation of the “soft coups” carried out in Honduras and Paraguay, and the intention exists to repeat them in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela.
In its current strategy of overthrowing the progressive governments in the region, imperialism has no need of appealing to the worn-out military dictatorships. Power is snatched away from the people’s legitimate representatives with the complicity of traitorous judges, politicians and MPs, by means of arguments lacking any juridical or constitutional validity, disseminated by the large media in a Machiavelian way.
This is also the coup of O’Globo and the large information consortia which did not cease in their treacherous attacks against Dilma, Lula and the Workers’ Party for the crime of having eradicated poverty for 35 million Brazilians. The crime of having positioned Brazil, with its huge economic potential and largest natural resources in Latin America, at the service of those who were always excluded and of a foreign strategy that favored alliances like BRICS.
Our call from the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity for the Peoples is to reject with all our forces this coup d’état disguised as “parliamentary”, perpetrated by the Brazilian oligarchy and the imperialism, and to convey our total solidarity with President Dilma Rousseff.
We ask our governments and parliaments in Latin America and the Caribbean, MERCOSUR, UNASUR and CELAC for their full rejection to the coup, as expressed by the revolutionary governments of Cuba, Venezuela and ALBA.
We will fight unceasingly for the legitimate return of Dilma Rousseff to power.
We will never recognize the putsches´ and usurping government of Michel Temer.
Our total solidarity to the Brazilian people, to the workers, to the landless and homeless, to social movements and the Workers’ Party!
Courage, President Dilma! The peoples are at your side!
They will not get away with it!
And There Was a Coup in Brazil
By Emir Sader (*)
ALAI AMLATINA, 31/08/2016.- The dream of the Brazilian rightist forces since 2002 has become true. Not in the same ways it had attempted before. Not when it attempted to overthrow Lula in 2005 with an impeachment that did not work out. Not with the electoral attempts of 2006, 2010, 2014, when it was defeated. Now they found the short cut to interrupt PT (Workers’ Party by its Spanish acronym) governments, even more when they would continue losing elections, with Lula as next candidate.
It was by means of a soft coup, for which those of Honduras and Paraguay have served as laboratories. Defeated in four successive elections and with the enormous risk of losing them in the future, the right appealed to the short cut of an impeachment without any grounds, counting with the treason of the vice president, elected twice with a program but willing to implement the program defeated four times in the ballot boxes.
Availing himself of the parliamentary majority elected to a great extent with the financial resources collected by Eduardo Cunha – unanimously acknowledged as the most corrupt of all corrupts in Brazilian politics – the right overthrew a president reelected by 54 million Brazilians without being capable of presenting any evidence to justify impeachment. It is the new form adopted by the rightist coup in Latin America. Democracy does not have indeed a long tradition in Brazil. In the last nine decades there were only three civilian presidents elected by popular vote who completed their terms in office. Along almost three decades there were no presidents chosen in democratic elections. Four civilian presidents elected by popular vote did not conclude their mandates.
It is not clear whether democracy or dictatorship is an intermission in Brazil. Since 1930, regarded as the contemporary Brazil with Vargas’ revolution, practically half of the time the presidents were elected by popular vote and the other half were not. More recently, Brazil had twenty-one years of military dictatorship, plus five years of government by José Sarney, elected not by direct vote but by an Electoral Board appointed by the dictatorship – that is, twenty-six consecutive years without a democratically elected president – followed by twenty-six years of presidential elections.
But in this century Brazil was enjoying a democracy with social content, approved by the majority of the population, in four successive elections. Precisely when democracy began to gain social consistency the right evidenced that it cannot stand it.
That was what happened with the soft, or institutional, or parliamentary coup, but in the end, a coup. It was a coup, in the first place, because no reason has been produced to end Dilma’s mandate. In the second place, because the vicepresident, still an acting one, began to implement, not the program that had elected him vice president, but the program that had been defeated four times, two of them with him as candidate to the vice-presidency.
It is a true assault on power by the most unqualified group of corrupt politicians Brazil has ever known. Politicians who have been successively defeated become ministers, president of the Chamber of Representatives, which would not be possible through popular vote, only through a coup.
What will happen to Brazil now?
In the first place, a huge social crisis. The economy, which had already been in recession for at least three years, will endure the very hard effects of the worst fiscal adjustment the country has ever known. The ghost of stagflation becomes a reality. A government without popular legitimacy, implementing a hard adjustment in an economy in recession, is going to produce the greatest economic, social and political crisis the country has ever known. The coup is not the end of the crisis but its strengthening.
It is a defeat, the end of the political period opened with Lula’s first victory in 2002. But, even recovering the State and the initiative it provides, the Brazilian right has very little force to consolidate its government.
It faces not only the economic and social crisis, but also a revitalized popular movement and Lula’s leadership. Brazil becomes a stage of great mass and political disputes. The putsches’ government will try to reach 2018 with a devastated country, trying to prevent Lula from being a candidate and with a lot of repression against popular mobilizations. The popular movement has to reformulate its strategy and platform, develop wide and combative forms of mobilization, so that the putsches’ government will be another intermission in the country’s history.
(*) Emir Sader, Brazilian sociologist and political scientist, is the Coordinator of the Laboratory of Public Policies at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, the Spanish acronym).
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