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Tag: President Jair Bolsonaro

  • Brazil: 39 people charged over pro-Bolsonaro riots

    Brazil: 39 people charged over pro-Bolsonaro riots

    The 39 defendants are to be sentenced to prison and have $7.7 million of their assets frozen to help pay for the damages, according to the prosecution.

    Some of the thousands of people accused of storming government buildings in an effort to overturn the results of the October election, which former President Jair Bolsonaro lost, have received their first charges from Brazil’s prosecutor-general.

    The 39 defendants accused of ransacking Congress were also asked to have 40 million reals ($7.7 million) in assets frozen as a preventive measure and to be imprisoned, according to the prosecutors in the recently established group to combat anti-democratic acts.

    The defendants have been charged with armed criminal association, violent attempt to subvert the democratic state of law, staging a coup and damage to public property, the prosecutor general’s office said in a written statement. Their identities have not yet been released.

    More than 1,000 people were arrested on the day of the January 8 riot, which bore strong similarities to the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Congress by mobs who wanted to overturn former President Donald Trump’s loss in the November 2020 election.

    Rioters who stormed through the Brazilian Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court in the capital, Brasilia, sought to have the armed forces intervene and overturn Bolsonaro’s loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

    The rioters “attempted, with the use of violence and serious threat, to abolish the democratic rule of law, preventing or restricting the exercise of constitutional powers”, according to an excerpt of charges included in a statement. “The ultimate objective of the attack … was the installation of an alternative government regime.”

    The attackers were not charged with “terrorism” because under Brazilian law such a charge must involve xenophobia or prejudice based on race, ethnicity or religion.

    The prosecutor-general’s office sent its charges to the Supreme Court after the Senate’s president, Rodrigo Pacheco, last week provided a list of people accused of rampaging through Congress. Additional rioters are expected to be charged.

    Second Brazilian arrested for anti-Lula bomb plot

    On Tuesday, Brazilian police said they arrested a second suspect in a truck bomb attempt that failed just a week before Silva’s inauguration.

    The first suspect was arrested on Christmas Eve after the driver of the truck found the device near the airport in the capital Brasilia, where the inauguration happened a week later.

    Police said there had been a failed attempt to activate the device.

    The first suspect, identified as George Washington de Oliveira Sousa, is a Bolsonaro supporter and told police he wanted to “prevent the establishment of communism in Brazil” under Lula, police said.

    An alleged accomplice, Alan Diego dos Santos Rodrigues, 32, has been wanted ever since and handed himself over to police on Tuesday in the state of Mato Grosso.

    Police “made contact with people close to the suspect and, after negotiations, this Tuesday (17th), Alan Diego presented himself,” a police statement said.

    A third suspect is on the run.

    Meanwhile, Lula has removed 40 troops guarding the presidential residence after expressing distrust in the military for failing to act against demonstrators who ransacked the government buildings.

    Most of the troops guarding the Alvorada Palace, as the residence is called, are from the army, but some are also members of the Navy, Air Force and a militarised police force.

    Last week, Lula told reporters that security force members were complicit in letting the mob storm the main buildings that form the seat of power in Brasilia.

    Source: Aljazeera.com

  • Bolsonaro heightened Brazil’s gun culture. Can Lula keep it under control?

    The number of privately owned guns in Brazil has nearly doubled in the last four years, to nearly 2 million.

    After winning the Brazilian election, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will be re-elected President of Brazil in January, more than a decade after he last held the position. Despite his narrow victory, current President Jair Bolsonaro received more than 49 percent of the vote.

    Lula, as he is known, will now attempt to roll back many of Bolsonaro’s right-wing policies – including the loosening of Brazil’s gun-control measures, which led to the number of guns in private hands doubling since 2018. But how easy will that be?

  • Brazil election: Bolsonaro supporters block roads after poll defeat

    Lorry drivers in Brazil loyal to President Jair Bolsonaro have blocked roads across the country, after his poll defeat to leftist rival Lula.

    Blockages were reported in all but two states, causing considerable disruption and affecting food supply chains.

    With all the votes counted, Lula had 50.9% of the valid votes against Mr Bolsonaro‘s 49.1% in Sunday’s run-off.

    The incumbent far-right president has neither conceded defeat nor challenged the results that divided the nation.

    There are concerns that the outgoing president could complicate the two-month transition period before Lula (full name Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva), a former president, is due to be sworn in on 1 January 2023.

    Pro-Bolsonaro lorry drivers started setting up roadblocks across the vast country soon after the election results were announced.

    By Monday night, the federal highway police reported 342 such incidents, with the biggest protests going on in the country’s south. Some of the blockages were later cleared by police.

    Many lorry drivers have benefited from lower diesel costs during the Bolsonaro administration.

    Jair Bolsonaro. Photo: 30 October 2022
    Jair Bolsonaro is yet to publicly comment on the election results

    Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes on Monday ordered the police to disperse the roadblocks immediately.

    He warned that all those still blocking the roads on Tuesday would be each fined 100,000 Brazilian reals (£16,700: $19,300) per hour.

    Mr Bolsonaro, 67, is said to have gone to sleep after he narrowly lost to his arch rival.

    Combative statements from Mr Bolsonaro in the past – such as that “only God” could remove him from office – mean there is a tense wait for him to appear in public. Before the election, he had repeatedly cast unfounded doubts on the voting system.

    In his victory speech soon after the results were made public, Lula, 77, touched on the political rift running through Brazil which further deepened during a bitterly fought and often acrimonious election campaign.

    “This country needs peace and unity. This population doesn’t want to fight anymore,” he said, promising to govern for all Brazilians and not just for those who had voted for him.

    Congratulations have poured in from across the world, including from the leaders of the UK, China, France, India and Russia. US President Biden said the win came “following free, fair and credible elections”.

    It is a stunning comeback for Lula, a politician who could not run in the last presidential election in 2018 because he was in jail and banned from standing for office.

  • Bolsonarism has already won in Brazil, even if Bolsonaro loses

    Bolsonaro has gained seats in Congress amid a broader rightward shift that will keep him influential even if Lula wins.

    Three days after the first round of voting in Brazil’s election on October 1, David Nemer, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, noted that “Twitter is not Brazil. Brazil is not on Twitter.”

    He was echoing the views of many experts who have cautioned that many on both the left and the right had been predicting the outcome of the vote based too much on Twitter trends and hashtags.

    As it turned out, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro proved pollsters wrong. While he did come second behind former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party as expected, the five-percentage point gap between them was much smaller than the double-digit gulf that had been predicted. Bolsonaro managed to force an October 30 runoff that would not have been necessary if Lula had secured more than half of the vote.

    Perhaps even more importantly, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party gave Brazil’s far-right its best-ever election night outcome since the country’s return to democracy nearly four decades ago. It won 99 seats in the lower house of Brazil’s Congress, 23 more than in 2017. It is the single-largest party in the lower house, and with allies, effectively controls almost half of the legislative chamber.

    The verdict is clear: Bolsonarism – the president’s far-right movement backed by political and social conservatives and evangelicals – has already won, irrespective of what happens in the runoff.

    If Bolsonaro defeats Lula, experts fear he might use his numbers in Congress to impeach Supreme Court justices. He could even increase the number of seats on the Supreme Court to appoint ideologically aligned judges – similar to what the military dictatorship did many years ago. The Supreme Court has served as an important counterweight to the government, including investigating a fake news network controlled from the government’s headquarters. Bolsonaro, in addition to attacks against judges of the court, has already said that he might tweak the makeup of the judiciary if he returns to power.

    But even if he loses on October 30, Bolsonaro’s supporters in Congress will have the clout to make governance very difficult for a Lula administration, including by blocking any progressive initiatives.

    “The country that Lula da Silva governed just 20 years ago basically does not exist anymore,” Felippe Ramos, a political analyst and doctoral candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research told me.

    Brazil has changed

    That’s not to say that Brazilian society under the center-left Lula – who was president from 2003 to 2010 – was progressive. However, the country has witnessed a dramatic political, economic and demographic shift that is underpinning the support for Bolsonarism. “The drivers are much deeper than politics,” Ramos said.

    As Ramos explained, Brazil has undergone a process of deindustrialization in recent years, with agribusinesses increasingly the engine of the economy. That has led to a growth in the economic influence of traditionally conservative states – a change reflected culturally too, with Sertanejo, Brazilian country music, going mainstream.

    Meanwhile, Brazil’s evangelicals – a solid support base for Bolsonaro – have shot up from five percent to over 30 percent of the population in less than three decades, signalling a broader conservative shift. This has given them significant influence in national politics and on how the overall population views moral issues.

    Evangelical denominations have even been accused of spreading fake news that, for instance, Lula might shut down churches if he returns to power or that the former president is a Satanist.

    Tech, too, has played a role, though not Twitter. It is, in fact, WhatsApp that is the main tool that Bolsonaro and his allies use to spread propaganda and disinformation among poorer and more remote communities.

    Rise of Bolsonarism

    Still, the nature of Brazil’s rightward shift, too, has evolved.

    For years, it was an imperfect fit between various far-right forces that managed to coalesce around Bolsonaro. Today there is greater ideological uniformity, with a central tenet at its heart: hard-core Bolsonarism, or extreme loyalty to the leader.

    Bolsonaro has cannibalised the traditional right and centrist poles of Brazilian politics while creating a movement that also overshadows other traditional strains of right-wing extremism.

    For evidence, look no further than the fate of former allies who turned critics and have performed poorly in the election — such as Joice Hasselmann, a former journalist who was elected to Congress in 2018 from Bolsonaro’s party after winning more than a million votes, the most by a female candidate. She subsequently fell out with Bolsonaro. This time, she couldn’t win even 14,000 votes.

    Ironically, Bolsonarism is also helped by the fact that its progressive opponents appear incapable of engaging with ideas outside their bubble even as they have abandoned the trade union struggle.

    A divided nation

    In effect, Brazilian politics today orbit around “two poles that are represented by Bolsonaro on the one hand, and by Lula and the Workers’ Party on the other,” Pablo Ortellado, professor of public policy management at the University of São Paulo, told me.

    The tension between them ends up exploding in the form of political violence. Supporters of the current president have killed several Workers’ Party voters, while in rare cases, Lula supporters, too, have engaged in violence against their counterparts in Bolsonaro’s camp.

    A Bolsonaro victory could mean the deepening of fascism in Brazil. It would facilitate the further growth of evangelical fundamentalism and lead to the increased devastation of the Amazon. It would portend more violence against Indigenous and left-wing activists and herald greater international isolation for Brazil. Whether the country’s democratic institutions would survive intact is doubtful. It’s hard to know whether Brazilian democracy itself would continue to breathe.

    A win for Lula, however, would still leave him facing a strong pro-Bolsonaro parliamentary opposition capable of stalling his plans, in a polarised and increasingly conservative society.

    While Bolsonaro has repeatedly threatened to not respect the outcome of the elections if he loses, he won’t need a coup to retain significant influence. His faithful and strong base of supporters in Congress will ensure that — even if not as president — Bolsonaro will continue to cast a shadow over Brazilian politics.

    DISCLAIMER: Independentghana.com will not be liable for any inaccuracies contained in this article. The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of The Independent Ghana

    Source: Aljazeera.com

     

  • Brazil federal police accuse Bolsonaro of COVID-linked scaremongering

    Brazil’s federal police on Wednesday accused President Jair Bolsonaro of discouraging mask use during the pandemic and falsely suggesting that people who got vaccinated against COVID-19 ran the risk of contracting AIDS.

    In a document sent to Brazil’s Supreme Court, a police delegate said Bolsonaro’s effort to discourage compliance with pandemic-linked health measures amounted to a crime, while his effort to link AIDS with vaccination amounted to a misdemeanor.

    The police asked Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is in charge of the probe, to authorize the police to charge Bolsonaro and others involved in the case.

    In a social media livestream last October, the far-right president said, without presenting any evidence, that UK government reports had shown that people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 had developed AIDS.

    Bolsonaro, who has declined to take the vaccine, was temporarily suspended from both Facebook and YouTube after the comments.

    The police said additional steps were needed to conclude the investigations, including hearing from Bolsonaro.

    The solicitor general’s office, which typically provides legal representation for the president, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Source:msn.com

  • Brazil election: Bolsonaro launches campaign

    Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has officially launched his re-election campaign, as he trails his main rival badly in opinion polls.

    Thousands of the far-right president’s supporters gathered at a stadium in Rio de Janeiro, where he was nominated.

    He promised to retain a welfare programme that makes cash payments to poorer Brazilians.

    His left-wing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is widely known for his policies to lift people out of poverty.

    Mr Bolsonaro’s candidacy was officially endorsed by his right-wing Liberal Party. The election is due to take place on 2 October.

    During the rally at Maracanãzinho stadium, Mr Bolsonaro told his supporters, “The army is on our side.”

    “It’s an army that doesn’t accept corruption, doesn’t accept fraud,” he added. Gen Walter Braga Netto, former defence minister, has been nominated as Mr Bolsonaro’s vice-presidential candidate.

    Lula, who previously served as president from 2003-10, was officially nominated by the left-wing Workers’ Party on Thursday. Some opinion polls suggest he leads Mr Bolsonaro by as many as 20 percentage points.

     

     

    Source: BBC