Think Trump is crazy? Check out Brazil’s current president

You have to hand it to would-be dictator wannabes, especially the right-wing variety: no law is too sturdy to break in the quest of carrying out a personal agenda. It is being reported that Donald Trump is willing break any and all laws to get his “wall” finished by the next election; any underling afraid to go to jail for him need not worry—he will pardon them. Of course, Trump’s isn’t exactly fulfilling his “promise” to his racist supporters; “Build the Wall” is actually more like “Build that barrier of poles with the black heat-absorbing paint with those pointy things on top.” Isn’t quite as “catchy,” is it? Trump and those who are formulating and enforcing his immigration policy claim that they are not doing so out of a racist impulse, but note that they never once confer any humanity in the migrants; they are just “vermin” that must be eradicated—and most of Trump’s supporters share this viewpoint. Does the U.S. already have too many people? It has the same land mass as China and twice that of India, yet both of those countries have more than four times the population of the U.S. The recent immigration raids in Mississippi only prove that the U.S. still has a desperate need for allegedly “low-skill” labor—legal or not (yeah, let’s see if a “high-skill” immigrant from Asia or a caste-conscious Indian can or will do that work). Trump and his supporters’ stupidity and bigotry is even more obvious by the deliberate misinformation campaign concerning what the so-called “diversity” lottery actually is.

Trump isn’t exactly alone in demonizing immigrants. Take, for instance, his counterpart in Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro. He opined that “We do agree with President Trump’s decision or proposal on the wall. The vast majority of potential immigrants do not have good intentions. They do not intend to do the best or do good to the US people,” which echoes Trump’s claims that other countries don’t send their “best,” just dump their “criminals” in this country. Bolsonaro, like Trump, claims he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body, but most Brazilians know this isn’t true, and most of the people know very well that their country has a deeply-rooted race problem—meaning they didn’t care if Bolsonaro is a racist or not when they voted for him. In fact many Brazilian prefer to believe that he is just being “playful” whenever he makes deliberately dehumanizing comments about nonwhites.

But he isn’t being “playful” when he refers to nonwhites in Brazil as “garbage,” and has admitted in an interview that he would refuse to have a nonwhite surgeon operate on him, or be a passenger on a plane if there was a nonwhite pilot flying it (I kind of wonder how many white Americans—let alone Trump—feels the same way). His public comments concerning indigenous peoples living in the Amazon indicate that he just sees them getting in the way of “business,” and he has often declared his contempt for indigenous rights. In a 1998 interview he expressed his unhappiness that the military forces of the descendants of Portuguese settlers had not been as “efficient” in eradicating native peoples as the U.S. Cavalry supposedly was.  

When John Oliver warned us on his HBO show that Brazilians were threatening to elect this lunatic as its president, I’m sure that nearly all of his listeners had no clue of or cared who Bolsonaro was. But it wasn’t like voters in Brazil had no clue who he was; Bolsonaro is very much like Trump in many ways, and none so obvious as the fact that he has a history of saying the most outrageously racist, sexist, homophobic  and ignorant things in general without ever appearing to suffer from it. He was elected for much the same reasons that Trump was—that voters were looking to “shake things up” after its last few presidents were convicted on corruption charges, and were content to play Russian Roulette with the country’s future—and as a result the most recent polling indicates that Brazilians are having “buyers’ remorse,” with his administration’s disapproval numbers worse than Trump’s, and 40 percent alone calling Bolsonaro’s own performance as president “terrible”—and he has only been in office since January. 

Brazilians have tended to vote for center/left candidates for president since the end of the country’s infamous right-wing military dictatorship, and now many are remembering why. Bolsonaro has looked with “nostalgia” upon the “glorious” military regime in Brazil, only criticizing it for not going far enough in the engagement of torture and murder of left-wing opponents.  He even admits to daydreaming about his expectation of a “civil war” and not repeating such “mistakes.” His socially right-wing bent is not merely racist and ragingly homophobic (a subject he has talked about so often because, it appears, he fears his own sons might be infected by the “gay” bug), but his commentary concerning what is or isn’t permissible when dealing with women is positively Trump-like as will. When questioned by a woman, whether a reporter or a political opponent, about past comments concerning the permissibility of rape, he typically responds by claiming that she shouldn’t worry about him raping her because she is too “ugly.” 

Bolsonaro has also decried that military police did not kill more prisoners in the infamous 1992 Carandiru prison massacre, an incident which still excites angry memories among Brazilians. Initially it began after a brawl broke out during a prisoner soccer match, which quickly got out of hand and around 2,000 prisoners became involved, armed with brickbats of various sorts. Only 15 guards were present, which tells of the laxity of security at the prison.  Because of the impossibility of controlling the situation, the prison director contacted the local military police for help; the result was that 111 prisoners were killed, despite the fact that not one police officer was even wounded. An investigation revealed that those who died were most likely simply shot dead on the spot, including those who were found only wounded (only 37 initially wounded survived). Also, some of the wounded were killed when police dogs were unleashed on them. It was also determined that most of those killed were likely in defensive postures. What is more, the prisoners themselves were not even “convicts,” but being detained on various charges. Although a number of police were eventually convicted on murder charges, none of them actually served time; a judge voided all charges since, according to him, they acted in “self-defense.” The evidence, however, showed that they just walked in with guns blazing. One of the results of the massacre was that prison gangs, rather than fighting each other, found a “common purpose” in turning their attentions to the police. 

Crime—especially violent crime—is a serious problem in Brazil, but like many problems it is due not just to social environment and economic disparities, but just plain short-sighted stupidity, which far-right extremists like Bolsonaro have shown a “talent” for. During the period of military dictatorship, politically-left militants were imprisoned with common criminals. The result of this was that criminals with gang tendencies who generally committed their crimes haphazardly learned the value of “organization” and the usefulness of governing gang behavior by “laws” which they applied to themselves to keep members in “line”—in or out of prison. The 1994 crime bill sponsored by the Clinton administration which greatly expanded the prison population and lengthened sentences can be argued to have had the same effect in this country. Bolsonaro has claimed a “preference” for just killing as many criminals as “legally” as possible, but this “solution” is typical of those who helped create the problem in the first place—just as it was the U.S. who created the gang problem in Central America by “deporting” gang members incubated in the U.S. to those countries; it is with terrible irony to note that most of the asylum seekers from Central America are doing so out of fear of a problem whose fault lies entirely at the doorstep of this country.

But the view of  “Captain Chainsaw,” as enunciated by former government minister Rubens Ricupero, as “the most despised and detested leader on earth” is due to his environmental record, particularly in regard to the preservation of the Amazon rainforest. Although the total area of forest destruction typical in a year sounds “small” compared the seeming vastness of the Amazon—about the area of Delaware destroyed out of the total area of about half of the continental U.S.—this all adds-up in time. People might believe that because it rains for most of the year in the Amazon that it “naturally” regenerates, but that is not exactly true. The amount of rain is largely due to the process of evapotranspiration, which provides the sky above a continuous source of precipitation during the long rainy season. But at some point if the current degree of forest destruction continues, not only will the rain “stop,” but in its place will be the release of vast amounts of stored carbon dioxide, which the Amazon is currently the largest absorber of. What this means is that instead of mitigating global warming, it will be one of the worst contributors to the problem, not just initially from the level of burning which has turned day into night in many cities near these uncontrolled fires.

While the current degree of deforestation due to burning is not unprecedented, the reason for it is. Nearly all fires in the Amazon are started by deliberate human design during the relatively brief “dry period,” which farmers, loggers and ranchers take advantage of with a vengeance. Most of this burning and forest clearing is technically illegal in Brazil, but Bolsonaro has made it de facto policy to ignore this burning in the name of “economic growth.” The new governmental attitude of indifference toward burning has had its effect: despite no different weather-related factors as in 2018, since Bolsonaro took office in 2019 the number of fires has already more than doubled. There is no question about “cause and effect” here. Bolsonaro, like Trump, has also shown contempt for science; when his own environmental minister tried to talk sense to him, he was fired, and when presented with photographic evidence from Brazil’s own government satellites of the extent of the fires, Bolsonaro still claimed it was all “lies.”

Bolsonaro has been engaged in an ongoing feud with French president Emmanuel Macron—who has made the environment a personal issue—but in general he has had only one “ally” globally in this foolishness: Trump.  Right-wing contempt for environmental issues isn’t new, of course. While Richard Nixon tried to court liberal support with a progressive environmental agenda, that changed with the Reagan administration. Interior secretary James Watt was literally just waiting for the “end of the world,” while Ann Gorsuch and Rita Lavelle ran the EPA as if it were a corporate cost-cutting department. But while Trump’s attitude toward the environment is equal parts due to his lack of empathy for the party effected (like those “Mexicans” in Puerto Rico) or because of his prior beef with environmental regulators, Bolsonaro just seems to want to be contrary and takes glee at upsetting as many people as he can.

Bolsonaro has in recent days been forced to take a more “conciliatory” attitude toward those demanding action over his inaction in combatting the burning, claiming he will accept assistance from other countries if they stop criticizing him, but more so because Brazilian public opinion has turned sharply against him. That is one thing that can be said about him in his “favor”: instead of calling it “fake news,” he actually takes bad poll numbers seriously, if nothing else.