Brazil’s Bolsonaro says military would follow his orders to take the streets

Under-fire South American leader continues to try to assert his dominance over country’s armed forces

(Via REUTERS)

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has claimed that “the order will be followed” if he decides to tell the country’s military to take the streets.

With some already fearing the former army captain – who is under fire on multiple fronts – could be laying the ground to disrupt a peaceful handover of power at next year’s presidential elections, Mr Bolsonaro gave the clearest sign yet on Friday that he was willing to deploy the military onto the country’s streets.

With Brazil’s coronavirus crisis spiralling, its president has been dismissive of both the virus itself, and of measures to contain it – warning in recent weeks of social chaos and unrest as a result of restrictions to movement and trade enforced locally by individual states and cities.

Speaking during a TV interview, Mr Bolsonaro said he would not “go into details into what I’m preparing”, but warned that “if we were to have problems, we have a plan of how to enter the field ... our armed forces could one day go into the streets”.

Such a move, O Globo reported him as saying, would be to “re-establish Article 5 of the constitution”, which makes reference to the individual rights of Brazil’s population. The Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper described him as talking of “curfew cowardice”.

The comments by Mr Bolsonaro, who has long praised Brazil’s two-decade military dictatorship, will do little to assuage critics who are concerned by his politicisation of the military. Others worry about his commitment to a peaceful handover of power in the event of a tight result in next year’s presidential election.

Having thrown his support behind Donald Trump’s conspiracies of a stolen election last year, which culminated in the former US president’s supporters fatally storming the Capitol in Washington DC, Mr Bolsonaro has similarly made baseless allegations of voter fraud in Brazil since his election in 2018.

While no stranger to intense criticism, Mr Bolsonaro currently finds himself increasingly under fire – with the Senate recently launching an inquiry into his handling of the pandemic, and talk of his possible impeachment growing.

Meanwhile, the stars appear to be aligning for his possibly most dangerous political rival, ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to run against him in 2022 – with Brazil’s supreme court this week upholding last month’s ruling that controversial judge Sergio Moro, who was later appointed Mr Bolsonaro’s justice minister, had been biased in convicting Mr Lula da Silva of corruption charges in 2017.

The conviction, which prevented the towering left-wing politician from challenging Mr Bolsonaro back in 2018, was annulled by the court on procedural grounds in March, with a supreme court judge calling the corruption probe into Mr Lula da Silva “the greatest judicial scandal” in the country’s history.

Days later, as one opinion poll suggested Mr Lula da Silva could enjoy half of the Brazilian vote – and 12 points more than Mr Bolsonaro – the former president lambasted his current successor’s approach to the pandemic as “moronic”, claiming: “This country has no government”, and deriding the lack of available vaccines, which Mr Bolsonaro is now urgently attempting to procure.

Frequently pitting his supporters against the supreme court and the senate, Mr Bolsonaro has sought to assert increasing control over Brazil’s military during his time in office – appointing various military officials to cabinet positions, and many more throughout government.

“If we also consider some second-tier and third-tier bureaucracy positions, we are talking about thousands, or maybe tens of thousands of military – active or retired – that today are in the Brazilian government,” Guilherme Casarões, political scientist and professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Public Administration school, told the Australian broadcaster ABC on Saturday.

“This is very, very different from what we’ve had in the last 35 years. One of the cornerstones of our civilian democracy was precisely to keep the military out of politics. So by bringing them back into politics – Bolsonaro himself is a former army captain – I think he is trying to send a message to all his political opponents.”

But Brazil’s military is in crisis, with the commanders of its army, air force and navy all resigning last month, after Mr Bolsonaro fired his defence minister and longtime ally General Fernando Azevedo e Silva.

Eliane Cantanhêde, a journalist with Estado de São Paulo, suggested the general had left government after making it clear to Mr Bolsonaro that the military was not the president’s personal force, The Guardian reported.

Lucas Rezende, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, said he believed the military row, which came on the anniversary of Brazil’s 1964 coup d’etat was sparked by Mr Bolsonaro’s desire to put the military on the streets in response to coronavirus restrictions.

“Most likely what he ordered was putting the military on the streets in these states or cities that the governors or the mayors decided on some kind of local social restrictions,” Professor Rezende told PRI.

Additional reporting by Reuters