Military in Brazil: the permanent coup d’état

“Bolsonaro wants to make political use of the armed forces”, “the armed forces are a state institution”, “the military defends the Constitution”. An endless list of self-deceptive phrases like these could be listed above, but let’s get down to facts and history.

This week we have witnessed an upheaval of news surrounding the dance of ministerial chairs in Brasilia, on the eve of the intolerable commemoration by the military and “good citizens” of the 1964 coup. It is urgent that we, ordinary people who are seen as second-class citizens, come to an understanding: the Brazilian Armed Forces have always been involved in national politics and have almost always been in charge. They founded the Republic and, from 1930 onwards, implemented a National Security project that gave them a “civilizing mission” and the duty to intervene in all aspects of Brazilian public life, from security to education. The military is an organization with political interests, this truism bears repeating.

It is part of the military’s professional ethos to identify itself as the institution most capable of build and lead the Brazilian nation, because all other civilian institutions, according to them, would be morally weak, segregated and not interested in the common good of the country. This is a military party, not in the sense of a political party that contests elections, but of a programmatic political party that seeks to impose its interests in the public arena and, in the case of the Armed Forces, to impose the physiological interests of the corporation and dispute the budget for its agendas and objectives.

After all, who believes, in today’s Brazil, that the military is not involved in politics when there are more than 6,000 of its members in positions in the civilian public bureaucracy? In addition, they have headed more and more ministries since 2016, when the International Security Office (Gabinete de Segurança Internacional – GSI) was reinstated – due to military pressure after it was abolished by the Dilma government – and headed by General Etchegoyen. The current vice-president, General Mourão, when he was on active duty and commanding troops in the south, advocated a “patriotic struggle” for a change of government in 2015, amid the growing pro-impeachment movement. In 2018, through the then Commander of the Army, General Villas-Boas, the military pressured the Supreme Court to keep former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva convicted and ineligible. In 2019, they stayed out of the Pension Reform and acquired career advantages. If that’s not getting involved in politics on behalf of corporate interests, we don’t know what is.

The military’s rhetoric has always been about defending democracy, but they refuse to admit the human rights violations and torture committed in their facilities during the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985), and they have always condemned the National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade – CNV), working against its implementation and the release of its reports. In 2009, the commanders of the three arms even threatened to leave their posts if the CNV suggested that the military could be held responsible for commanding the dictatorial regime. Between 2011 and 2014, Dilma Rousseff – and other women in the government, such as Maria do Rosário and Eleonora Menicucci, who was also a militant and tortured during the dictatorship – were openly attacked by the military because of the CNV.

The military claims to defend the Brazilian people. Meanwhile, they see the demarcation of indigenous lands as a threat to sovereignty, with pacification – the foundation of colonization that oscillates between genocide and ethnocide – of these populations and integration into “civilization” being one of their main concerns. In the speeches, call the peripheries and favelas of cities a “human terrain” whose residents are prone to violence and less collaborative with the state, while at the same time concentrating career advantages and budget transfers. Since 1996, there hasn’t been a year without an Operation to Guarantee of Law and Order (Garantia da Lei e da Ordem – GLO) – a military action whose targets are Brazilian citizens themselves¹. They carry out civic-social actions to socialize the population along their lines, always following their vocation to pacify and maintain social order. 

The armed forces say a lot of things, always for their own benefit. It is therefore necessary to distinguish what they say from what they do, and not to reproduce the press release that aim of “cleaning up” the image of the military involved in Bolsonaro’s government of death. Despite the possible differences between them, the senior officers have a common interest: guaranteeing the survival of the corporation and preserving themselves. The Brazilian military claim to be the holders of the Reason of State. It is under this logic that we should view the changes in the ministries and commands of the three forces. More interesting than observing General Braga Netto’s greater proximity to President Jair Bolsonaro, or the points of attrition with other officers, is to reflect on how he benefits, at a macro level, the stability of the military organization, preserving its immaculate role as guide and north of the nation.

Braga Netto, with a more discreet profile, does not jeopardize public relations with declarations or outbursts in the media, but guarantees the military continuity of the government, and also has experience in managing police forces. One of the central points of the Federal Intervention in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, which he led, was military control over the state’s police forces in order to understand, restructure and coordinate their functions and, in theory, improve public safety.

No Operation to Guarantee of Law and Order, Pacification or Federal Intervention operation has considerably improved violence rates. This is to stick to the facts and be guided by the official figures, without going into the long-term effects of these interventions and the formatting of public life in militarized terrain, occupied as a war zone. Thus, even from this alone, it can be seen that the number of deaths by state agents has increased and, given this, the occasional reductions in cargo theft cannot be seen as a gain under any circumstances – life should always come before property, but this is not the case for modern law, nor for public security policies. In this sense, it’s worth pointing out that the justification for using the military under the banner of logistics and efficiency is another fallacy propagated by uniformed personnel and specialists with a kind of fetish for uniforms, boots and pistols. 

In Haiti, for example, where the Brazilian Armed Forces took part in the UN peacekeeping operation (MINUSTAH), the so-called success story turned out years later to be a case of human rights violations, rapes and allegations of interference in the country’s electoral process by Brazilian forces. During the COVID-19 pandemic, marked by the disastrous presence of an active-duty general as Minister of Health, General Pazuello, the armed forces demonstrated their support for a president who denies science and proven efficient responses to contain the virus, such as mass vaccination, in favor of his power project that sees citizens as enemies of his order and budgetary interests.

Therefore, there is no doubt that the Armed Forces are acting politically and have committed a series of attacks against the population they claim to defend. Behaving like a corporation, the military defend only themselves, their versions of the facts, their agendas and seek to impose them on all the people who inhabit the territory they command. This is the case of March 31, which they insist on describing as a date celebrating a “movement” (sic) necessary for the country’s security against the communist enemy, subservient to the military defense strategy of the US government during the so-called Cold War, which in its interventions and the act of war by the two competing powers, was very hot for the peoples of the so-called Global South. In their construction of the narrative, the military and the “good citizens” celebrate on this date, and not on April 1st, when the coup actually took place, so as not to be associated with April Fool’s Day. There is nothing more appropriate than this proximity, because the Brazilian Armed Forces lie, and a lot. That’s why we need the courage of truth in the face of the sovereignty of the military and to affirm the memory of the struggles, the courage of those who clashed with the powers that be even under a violent and bloody dictatorship led by the military and financed by businessmen, drummers and the mainstream media. Not to salute this courage is to perpetuate the connivance of those who also collaborated by omission with the arrests, torture and deaths that continued to be practiced even after the re-establishment of democracy in police stations, barracks, prisons, quebradas, ghettos and alleys by the military, police and military police.

Wanting to remain victorious in history, the military, in their narrative, are once again attacking the memory of those who were the target of state terror, both physical and psychological. The state violence that continues to pile up bodies all over the country will not stop unless this courage of truth is affirmed. Otherwise, with the triumph of the narrative of the uniformed and the “good citizens” and their fetish for uniforms, boots and pistols, not even the dead are free.

¹ Guarantee of Law and Order are carried out exclusively by express order of the President of the Republic to call for the intervention of the Armed Forces in situations where it is assessed that the capacity of the public security forces to guarantee political and social order has been exhausted. Legally, GLO is regulated by the Federal Constitution and by Complementary Law 97/1999 and Decree 3.897/2001, which “sets the guidelines for the use of the Armed Forces in guaranteeing law and order and makes other provisions”. At the beginning of 2014, civilian and military advisors, responding to a request from the Ministry of Defense, produced a “GLO Manual” that standardizes the routine and serves as doctrinal guidance for the forces deployed for this type of activity exclusive to the Armed Forces.