Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: When you go through the Bolsonarist dump, you can see the size of the coup

It is enough to rummage the surface of the Bolsonarist dump to find a fresh corpse of the coup d’état. As several coup offensives were or still are planned and implemented by lowly and lunatic little people, the impression can be left that many of these initiatives were shoddy and ridiculously ineffective.

These same words could describe Jair Bolsonaro’s project to become president, explicitly launched at a 2014 rally at the Army officers’ school. Merely three years later, at the end of 2017, the defender of the military dictatorship, torture, genocide, civil war and preacher of rape was normalized, accepted by economic and political elites.

It is true that many scammers, vandals and terrorists, often minors, are being investigated and prosecuted. Bolsonaro’s criminal career, both before and after he was elected president, was able to continue without a hitch. However, everything happens as if the country could “move on”.

It cannot, if there is not a greater process. There is a risk of believing that punctual punishments, mostly for small people, may be able to contain a coup offensive that was or is very wide, with financiers, supporters and big articulators, in the political, military, business and religious world. It is quite possible that up to a thousand bagrinhos will be condemned and an accordion will be arranged for a few dozen sharks of Bolsonarism.

Bolsonarism is this mixture of cracks and dictatorships, of a lunatic sect with propaganda expert in technology, of crowdfunding for lunchboxes with big money or support from people from “liberal institutes”. The coup is part of the often crazy everyday life of dictatorial lambaris and big Bolsonar politicians. It’s micro and macro.

The most recent example of the micro-macro of Bolsonaro’s coup routine was the disturbed denunciation of this senator Marcos do Val (Podemos-ES). At the very least, there appears to have been a meeting where Bolsonaro and do Val listened to criminal ex-deputy Daniel Silveira describe his plan to annul the election. It would be an attempt to replicate a Joesley Day (when Joesley Batista stapled Michel Temer). They wanted a Xandão Day, an attempt to “prove” Alexandre de Moraes’ partiality

The plan looks like puerile, lunatic delinquency, the revenge of a minor criminal, nevertheless received and heard by Bolsonaro. It’s Bolsonarism: dedication of idle time to conspiracies, real or imaginary, hallucinatory, coup plotters or with the aim of getting Bolsonaro out of jail, involving rabble of all classes.

It should be remembered that these people, however, since November 12 have been capable of a riot before the Federal Police, of planning a terrorist attack against Brasília airport, of attacking the headquarters of the three Powers, of trying to block the distribution of fuel, knocking down electricity transmission towers, drawing up “minutes” of a coup.

They counted on the collaboration, at least, of the Army to shelter, on their sidewalks, the militias of the 8th of January attempt and with the propaganda of businessmen, religious leaders and parliamentarians, several of them still campaigning to attack the Supreme Court, as if seen in the Senate election.

The plans didn’t work out. But they were a dress rehearsal, with the incitement of lunatic revolutionary masses, organized and financed also by the federal power, by the then Bolsonaro Presidency. Without a legal dragnet that catches everything from lambaris to sharks, there is a risk of accepting that the coup-mongering gang is a definitive part of the Brazilian political landscape.