A visit to São Paulo this past month was unusually troubling. Poverty has never been more visible, and city streets are littered with tents and families living in parks and under bridges. Anecdotal evidence suggests brain drain is picking up: both rich and poor acquaintances are moving to Europe and the US, and recent reports highlight powerful push and pull factors driving emigration. The pandemic has been deeply felt, and everyone I spoke with seemed to share a story of a friend struck down by Covid.
Against this troubling backdrop, however, most unsettling of all were the signs of Brazil’s deepening political crisis.
The past year has brought many indicators of President Jair Bolsonaro’s disdain for democracy, including escalating attacks on the Supreme Federal Tribunal, Brazil’s high court, and a hastily arranged military parade in Brasília, seemingly arranged to intimidate Congress as it considered the president’s pet legislation. More recently, Bolsonaro has been calling for demonstrations on September 7, Brazil’s independence day, and his supporters have obtained permission to hold protests at major locales, including the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo. Past mobilizations by Bolsonaro have often turned out only modest numbers of supporters. But judging by social media, the September 7 protests may yet catch on among a relevant segment of the population. This has led some, such as journalist Thomas Traumann, to worry that the demonstrations might become a rehearsal for an “auto-golpe,” triggering violence that might provide the excuse for a military intervention.
Against this backdrop, it was somewhat of a relief to read Wendy Hunter and Diego Vega’s keen analytical survey of the military’s politics under Bolsonaro. Hunter, the leading specialist on the Brazilian military under the democratic regime, and Diego Vega, a journalist and doctoral candidate at UT-Austin, offer a deep dive into the military’s “re-appearance” under Bolsonaro. They point to a number of worrisome factors that reflect the growing influence of the military, including a three-fold increase in the number of military personnel in appointed positions between 2014 and 2020, Bolsonaro’s decision to increase military salaries and budgets (in a general context of fiscal austerity), and his calls to deploy the military to “defend civil liberties” against those calling for a vaccine mandate.
The military has, as Hunter and Vega point out, “become more assertive in engaging in political debates” and “leverage[d] the relationship to advance their own interest,” in part in reaction to a series of slights that have accumulated over the past generation, including a truth commission the military viewed as one-sided and a steady reduction in military prerogatives. But Hunter and Vega also note that the military high command has growing reservations about propping up an increasingly unpopular president, and they “do not anticipate a democratic breakdown through an institutional military intervention, a traditional coup or even an incumbent takeover.”
Recent events seem to offer support for Hunter and Vega’s argument. The high command has not welcomed Bolsonaro’s more combative pronouncements. In March of this year, the three service commanders resigned simultaneously in protest against the firing of the Defense Minister (who had resisted the president’s demand that he publicly condemn a Supreme Court decision allowing former president Lula to run for office again in 2022). The new commanders are all drawn from the military’s ranks, in strict obedience for the internal hierarchy of the armed forces, rather than hand-picked by Bolsonaro. Further, as Hunter and Vega note, “cooler heads” within the military now seem keen to underscore respect for the constitution, and have demonstrated a “reluctance to be drawn in deeper politically.”
But two problematic issues remain. First, as Hunter and Vega note, as the military becomes more politicized and de-professionalized, it turns into an “ever more pliant tool.” Small steps opening up the government to military officers’ influence accumulate over time. The increasing politicization of the military is therefore worrisome both because of its effects under the current populist president, and on the military’s likely future role in Brazilian democracy.
The second issue, which Hunter and Vega understandably could not address given the already broad scope of their article, relates to the role of Brazil’s truculent state police forces. Bolsonaro’s appeal among the police may be even more widespread and less contained than within the military officer corps. Recently, the former commander of São Paulo’s murderous ROTA police force argued that “military intervention to defend democracy is not a golpe.” There appears to have been a strong behind-the-scenes mobilization of police officers to join the Independence Day demonstrations, including by renting buses to shuttle off-duty police officers in from the countryside. One high-ranking officer in the São Paulo police force was fired after actively pushing police to join the September 7 demonstrations, with the governor forcefully declaring that he would not tolerate indiscipline in the ranks.
In the best of worlds, the turnout on September 7 will be a flop, with a combination of internal hierarchy and external discipline curbing the participation of active duty police officers. But pro-Bolsonaro sentiment in the ranks of state police forces, and therefore his supporters’ ability to wreak havoc in key population centers, is clearly significant. Democratic institutions are by no means out of danger, and the thirteen months between Independence Day and the October 2022 elections will be marked by significant tension, exacerbated by the President himself, along with his allies in arms.
Photo credit: Flickr, Divino Advincula, 2012.
