This will be a decisive year for Brazil.
As part of an electoral supercycle of major changes in Latin America, the country decides in October whether to give Jair Bolsonaro another term or to follow the example of its neighbors and make a new ideological shift away from the extreme right.
If it chooses the second option, Brazil will still have many challenges to face, the main one, perhaps, of recovering from three years of a government policy guided by destruction and setback.
Bolsonaro was elected with a central promise: to destroy. The agenda was to destroy the legacy of the Brazilian “left”. His speeches focused on attacks on the achievements of identity movements and on minorities, as well as on social rights and policies erected after the 1988 Constitution.
Make no mistake, this legacy to be destroyed includes the political and social achievements of the New Republic. It is this pact that is at risk.
The effects of destruction are everywhere: in the unrealized population census; the data on the pandemic that had to be released by a press consortium; in the absence of transparency in public acts; in the insufficiency of monitoring data on the production of public policies.
Finally, in the recent blackout of data on the Covid pandemic, leaving us adrift just as the country was swept away by the omicron variant.
Cuts and dismantling in science and education
Destruction works in different ways. Through budget cuts in several areas, the discontinuity of programs and public policies. Secretaries, departments, sectors demobilized, closed.
Science and technology, for example, suffer from the paralysis of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes); the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) is agonizing over the systematic cut in funding and research grants at different levels of education and areas of knowledge.
The National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep) and the National High School Examination (Enem), directly attacked, suffer from dismissals without clear criteria, with dismissals of directors, reports of cases of moral harassment, work overload, in addition to the ideological questioning about the quality of the work of its technicians, responsible for the elaboration and execution of the Enem.
How can we forget the recent fire in the Pantanal and the omission and lack of support from the federal government to fight it?
Burned and deforested areas have seen a record increase across the country since 2019, and the government’s response has been translated into speeches with empty and manipulative rhetoric, added to the cut of funds in the Ministry of the Environment and in the inspection and control bodies in this area. .
Similar and more serious effects have the delay in taking fundamental and urgent decisions.
The pandemic provides us with many examples. Demands for inputs, such as oxygen in Manaus, whose urgency was ignored; vaccines for Covid bought with an unjustifiable delay, a practice that was reproduced with childhood vaccination.
We pay with the lives of thousands of Brazilians.
setbacks in health
But not only cuts, paralysis and delays are the dismantling of public policies.
Let us remember the National Mental Health Policy (PNSM), implemented in 2001, and the National Policy on Drugs (PND), of 2006.
The current government has made fundamental changes to both, directly attacking the principles and achievements of the Psychiatric Reform. The targets are the deinstitutionalization of mental health care and the practice of harm reduction for the treatment of drug users.
The mental health model that prevailed until the beginning of the Bolsonaro government was guided by the recognition that people with mental disorders and drug users are political subjects, bearers of rights and that they should be treated in their own social environment.
Above all, the PNSM recognized people’s right to make decisions about their own lives and treatment.
Technical note 11/2019 published by the Ministry of Health brought changes that now allow the performance of private services such as Psychiatric Hospitals and Therapeutic Communities.
It also brought the possibility of compulsory hospitalization and the defense of abstinence as a way to prevent and combat drug use. The result was an increase in Therapeutic Communities from 2019.
In 2018, the federal government financed around 2,900 places in these institutions; in 2019, the Ministry of Citizenship financed 11,000 vacancies.
The last setback in health was the proposal, without scientific support, to include electroconvulsive therapy to contain aggressive behavior in cases of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the Clinical Protocol and Therapeutic Guidelines. The practice is considered torture by the UN (United Nations).
Resistance from other established powers, politicians, part of the media and civil society seems to have blocked action.
The task of reversing Bolsonaro’s policies
It is impossible to list all the changes and their consequences in this article. They are present in all public policies.
In this 2022 we have the urgent task of seeking to know and understand the meanings of each of them, scrutinizing each decree, each technical note, each budget cut, each discontinued and replaced program, or not.
The task is gigantic.
The next president will need to do much more than contain the advance of authoritarianism and the institutional destruction promoted by Bolsonarism.
Getting rid of the spending cap and stopping the dismantling will not rebuild our institutions, our public policies, it will not recover our democracy, our pact, our dignity.
If Brazilian society is not aware of the size and meaning of the dismantling promoted during the Bolsonaro government, we will not even be able to sweep the rubble.
