Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Bolsonaro calls the horde to burn the Petrobras witch

Jair Bolsonaro wants to burn the Petrobras witch at the stake. Although he can’t lower the price of gasoline and diesel by a few cents, which is really difficult, he tries to rouse the horde against an enemy of the people, an Ibsen character from the junkyard.

He seems to have fun with it too, like a rowdy brat who vents his hatred by laughing at the destruction it causes: with the CPI, Petrobras would lose another R$30 billion, as he said over the weekend.

The CPI may not come, but it served as a deceitful threat, which ended up overthrowing the president of the oil company, but not only. The powerful centrão, president of the Chamber and head of the family that supports Bolsonaro and takes the place of government, Arthur Lira (PP-AL) threatened to take the family of Petrobras directors and poke around their lives through the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry. It’s a warning to anyone who gets involved.

On the part of the powerful centrão, of the parties most smeared in petrolão and monthly, it is also a guerrilla movement, to overthrow the law of state-owned companies. That way it would be easier to appoint someone to a “directory that drills wells”, in Severino Cavalcanti’s immortal phrase. Cavalcanti was the first rallying cry and Carnival of the center, elected mayor in 2005, fallen for corruption in a cafeteria. It looked like mockery, but it was a warning. Lira is Cavalcanti’s sinister metamorphosis.

More seriously, Lira would have trouble with her threat. If she knew about Petrobras and hasn’t done anything so far, she prevaricated. If she doesn’t know anything, she commits some sort of illegal threat or embarrassment. Where is the CPI of Codevasf or FNDE, of the suspicions of business overbilling with parliamentary amendment?

As for the mass of incompetent and swindling measures, they should yield little, even in demagogic terms. If all of Petrobras’ profits went to vinegar, to subsidies, the price of a liter of gasoline and diesel would not drop more than R$1 and the company’s ruin would begin again. Taxing the export of crude oil is idiocy even for the trickster (Petrobras loses money and what if you do with crude oil? Bonfire?).

Gas vouchers and truck driver assistance even help some people, but they are bad social policies. Bursting the spending ceiling again to provide direct subsidy will yield pennies in the price and cause immediate collateral damage and further inflation and/or interest.

In short, this is a band of troglodytes dealing with a complicated machine. In calmer times, brucutus sniff and scratch the machine. In their fury, they smash everything on board, to see if a banana, a golden egg, money or votes can come out of it.

As for Bolsonaro, of course, it was always that. In addition to trying to disguise his laborphobia, ignorance and cowardice (it is always someone else’s fault), he expresses his resentment of the failed through variations in the desire to kill: destroy the system, lynch the governors in the epidemic, the STF in any situation , the quilombolas, the environmental inspector, the Indians, the gays, the left, etc.

All this is very old, known to any sane adult person. The repeated observation serves to remind us of the role of the most disguised collaborationists, those who called Brazil “a normal country”, those who said “outside of the noise, I see progress” and the omitted in general, the elites in particular.

More than that, it serves to remind these people: Bolsonaro has no limit. It will destroy whatever stands in the way of your tyrant’s project and free your family from jail. He will break the country, join any militia or centrão type. If it can, it will take you, your company and your money.