(Euskera) (Castellano)
As part of the new offensive of the fascist right wing close to ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, violence continues after his electoral defeat. His supporters claim that there was fraud, when in fact there are reported acts against PT voters, such as the prevention of voters to circulate on election day by the traffic police (PRF) on their way to the polling stations. His supporters have since mobilised by holding roadblocks (221 blockades!!), shooting at police officers, chasing opponents, and have called on the army to stage a coup to restore the government. Bolsonaro has not taken a public position, but that is precisely what he has been accused of, that his absence legitimises these acts and this strategy.
On 26 November Bolsonaro also participated in an army rally, where he greeted demonstrators with a banner reading «Bolsonaro, activate the Armed Forces against fraud at the polls». So, he has not asked for it verbally, but he supports them with these gestures or by not rejecting acts that cannot be accepted and that contradict the rules that he assumed in the elections.
In many ways it is reminiscent of the situation in the United States in 2020 after Trump‘s defeat and in which groups of people took over the Capitol to restore Trump to government.
Bolsonaro also is leaving office trying to make the most of his position by trying to distribute more benefits to the elite. On 3 November he ordered the payment of 7.863 billion euros in dividends to shareholders of Petrobras, one of the main public companies he tried to privatise. The move was challenged in court. With these, the forecast dividend distribution for 2022 would reach 32.35 billion euros, almost double the amount distributed in 2021. Coincidence: alleged corruption at Petrobras was the reason that put Lula in jail and ended Dilma Rousseff’s government.
The Aracruz massacre: Flavia present!
The latest and cruelest episode took place yesterday, November 25th, when a 16-year-old boy entered two schools in Aracruz (Espirito Santo) and proceeded to shoot indiscriminately. He was carrying a swastika, making his militancy and objectives clear, and used his father’s weapons, a policeman. Four people were killed (two teachers and a 12-year-old girl). One of the last ones died yesterday after being wounded: 38 years old teacher Flávia Amboss Merçom.
Flávia Amboss belonged to the Movement of People Affected by Dams in Brazil (MAB) and we would like to convey our solidarity to MAB and her family. We understand that her death is not a casual event, but that the clear intention of the fascist was to attack humble people, in a public school (Escola Estadual Primo Bitti), and among them, most often they are organised in one or another leftist group. The MAB today published a note thanking «for the solidarity and in demand of justice» and ending with a «Flavia presente!»
With Flavia we loose an activist against dams and who as a teacher was committed to improving the living conditions of the fishing and traditional communities of Espírito Santo. But also a person who was prepared and committed from the academy, as she had graduated in sociology and had completed her doctoral thesis in Anthropology this April on the Samarco (Vale) disaster (here you can watch her defence of this thesis).
This mining disaster occurred in 2015 in Mariana (Minas Gerais), affecting the entire course of the Doce river as it passed through that state and then through the state of Espírito Santo, where it also affected the entire coast, including Aracruz. As a consequence, thousands of people who made a living from fishing lost their livelihood, a situation that today, more than seven years later, has still not been overcome. MAB was very active in this disaster, providing assistance to the affected people, organising them and being the main denouncer. The UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) also mourned Flavia’s loss, where he also collaborated with the Environmental Studies Group (GESTA).
The assassin, despite his age, had been organising for two years, and it was not for nothing that he acted now, when the Bolsonaristas are calling for the taking up of arms and the intervention of the army.
The massacre is also reminiscent of those that are reported in the media from the United States, although, because of the dates (after the elections) and the swastika of the perpetrator, this one has a clear political agenda.
This murder is in addition to the one that took place on 30 October, after Bolsonaro’s narrow defeat was announced. Then, in Belo Horizonte, a Bolsonaro supporter shot at a family celebrating Lula’s victory, killing two of them. Therefore, we deduce that on the one hand they are armed, but on the other hand they believe they are legitimised to kill and that during the time Bolsonaro has been in power they have enjoyed immunity, which they hope to regain.
Flávia is yet another mortal victim of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), joining Nicinha and Dilma Ferreira. They were also joined two months ago by the murder of MAB activist Débora Moraes,, in a sexist crime. It is also no coincidence that they are all women, because dams, like other large infrastructures, affect women more, and therefore they are very militant; and because for the fascists and extractivists, women’s resistance is even more hurtful because of their macho mentality.
The Bolsonarista threat extends to other MAB activists, as they recently denounced, especially to activists in Congonhas where there are 24 dams, several of them threatening to collapse, as happened in Brumadinho and Mariana. Religious leaders who accompany these struggles have also been threatened, because they also contrast with the supposedly Christian ideal of the Evangelicals who support Bolsonaro. They have been accused of being Satanists and leftists, and have been subjected to defamatory campaigns aimed at nullifying them and thereby also nullifying the resistance that big business encounters in these places.
20 November, Black Consciousness Day
The 20th of November, with such fascist connotations for us (anniversary of the deaths of Francisco Franco and the creator of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and the assassinations of Basque militants by paramilitaries Santi Brouard and Josu Muguruza), is also special in Brazil because it is the Day of Black Consciousness. As the event that concerns us and what has been the Bolsonaro government (and the previous one of Temer) demonstrates, Brazil remains deeply racist, with an elite that in recent years not only demands power but exclusion, and as in the case of the indigenous, even extermination by denying them their rights and territory.
As MAB also denounces, «it is dangerous to be Black in Brazil». Their homicide rate is twice as high as that of whites, although there are far fewer of them. Bolsonaro’s current defeat came about because of the mobilisation of many black and indigenous people in reaction to the institutional racism of the Bolsonaro government.
Within the fascist offensive, on 26 November a white man armed with a knife, a truncheon and a guard dog, cowardly beat a street musician of African descent in the centre of Curitiba.
That is why the MAB calls for a structural fight against racism, in order to combat fascism. The same demand was made by anti-fascist activists in an article in CrimeThink: fascism is fought in the streets. Because the racism that Bolsonaro represents, fascism, is gaining followers and presence in the streets, and with it, acts like yesterday’s shootings in Aracruz, enjoy a social legitimisation that they should never have.
The reality is harsh, because this fact shows that Bolsonarismo (the successor to the military fascism that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985) is not willing to give up all power without causing pain. The PT did not win a very differentiated victory, and Bolsonaro’s fascism won almost half of the electorate, which corresponds to 60 million people! Of all those millions of people, given their social background, resources and interests, there is a considerable part ready to fight for him or for whoever rises as leader, and to reinstate a hegemonist government. Only the presence of the people in the streets and the international rejection will stop them.
Violence is the method of the elite: Rondonia
To these cases must be added the violence that the elite uses and has been using to impose its will, to guarantee the power and benefits of a few with respect to the collective, to society, to the majority. Among many cases, the one in the state of Rondônia stands out, where rural militias operate to keep out landless peasants and guarantee land to a landowner, Antônio Martins dos Santos, known as Galo Velho, who does not even live there but in Brasilia. The rural militia is a parapolice group, made up of gunmen and policemen, with a budget of 450 million reais, facilitates the illegal occupation of public land by landowners.
On the other side 16,000 families of landless workers who leave their dead (in 2016 there were 18 murders of MST (LandLess Movement) activists in Rondonia – in 1996 there was the Corumbiara massacre with 10 killed), organised in the MST which has been fighting for agrarian reform and to recover their land for three decades. Here too, this conflict stems from the concentration of land promoted by the military dictatorship, which made some of them very big, and which now, with Jair Bolsonaro in power, has been supported. It is not for nothing that Bolsonaro called the landless a «terrorist group».
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