O Cafezinho Daily Analysis – 23/03/2016
“Free me from the worlds born of hate, save me from the dark infinitude under which my heavens die. Send a ray of light into this night and may the stars lost in the dense mist of my soul leave. Show me the road to myself, open me a path in my depths. Set in me with the sun and give rise to my world.” Cioran, in The Book of Illusion.
By Miguel do Rosário, Cafezinho’s editor (the original in Portuguese is here).
From Rio de Janeiro.
I apologize for not having written analyses in recent days, but I have been literally buried in Facebook messages, whatsapps, emails, telephones, the majority of which were really important and which I had to answer.
In addition, Cafezinho has become one of the principal vehicles of this enormous counter-hegemonic articulation which has emerged to defeat a coup that is essentially mediatic. I had to pull up my sleeves2 and publicize each act against the coup, and there have been dozens, hundreds, of actions, every day in universities, trade unions, auditoriums, theaters, squares, roads…
Despite being called a juridical-mediatic, or mediatic-juridical, coup, the most important is the ‘mediatic.’ The juridical is a farce. A farce that has been constructed since the judgment of the mensalão, and which was never properly combated by the progressive sectors.
To write my analysis, I have to turn off my mobile, close the Facebook pages, forget everything else for a few minutes and concentrate. Let’s go.
The situation improved a little overnight. Teori Zavaski, the Federal Supreme Court Judge, ripped the key of Lula’s prison from the hands of Sergio Moro. We can at least calm ourselves in relation to this for a few days. Lula will not be arrested.
Two institutional steps have been taken against the ongoing coup: 1) the judgment of the full STF regarding the restoration of Lula to the position of the presidential Chief of Staff, bringing to an end Gilmar Mendes’ AI-5. 2) Movements to defeat impeachment in the Chamber of Deputies.
Nowadays, the progressive deputies in the Chamber are in a minority, but they are combative, and are divided between parliamentary and social activism. Never have they worked so much in their lives. They will have a place of honor in this history. I want to highlight the role of three deputies in particular: Jandira Feghali, from PCdoB, Wadih Damous, from PT, and Jean Wyllys, from PSOL.
Nevertheless, the most striking fact in my opinion is taking place outside the institutional field. It is on the streets that the principal game in being played.
The legalist side is growing at a dizzy pace.
At an incredible speed, the anti-coup movement has become larger than my analysis could imagine. It is like trying to see a skyscraper from up close. We stretch our necks upwards, until the back of our necks hurts, but we still cannot see its top.
All over Brazil, in practically every university, both public and private, anti-coup committees are being set up.
Large demonstrations against the coup had already occurred in the most important universities in the country. Others will occur today and over the coming days.
31 March promises to be the largest democratic event seen in our history.
However, democratic events do not have this monolithic characteristic of mediatic protests. We do not have ‘one’ big event, but many large events.
The fact that the most important thinkers will participate in the anti-coup events, that there will be such a large presence of intellectuals, artists, and the middle class, will once and for all kill the old prejudice against the supporters of the Petista (PT) governments, according to which those who take part are only the illiterate, those who received bolsa família (social welfare) or are bought with mortadella sandwiches.
No.
What we see in Brazil, more than a large movement against the coup that is underway, is an epistemological cut, with revolutionary consequences for our political future.
People have awoken to two processes of manipulation which have been underway in parallel: the process of media manipulation on the one hand, and on the other, the process of judicial manipulation.
Both are still active, and with great strength.
Having gambled everything on an institutional rupture, the golpista forces of the media are cornered and desperate.
Sometimes I think that deep down they known they have lost the war. They will be defeated if the coup is successful and they will be defeated if the coup fails.
If the coup is successful, there will be resistance, at a much greater magnitude than what we have imagined.
To maintain the stability of a golpista government, they will have to appeal to the ever increasing repression of organized structures, which will generate greater revolt and even more resistance.
If the coup fails, the legalist resistance will demand from the government, this time with an infinitely greater impetus, measures to curb the manipulation of information. In other words, a dual defeat of the coup.
There is a dialectic from which the media cannot escape. The more the golpista forces (whose center is Globo) are mired in their manipulations, the more the audience of alternative means of communication will increase.
The audience of the blogs has exploded: individually they are being measured from 400 to one million page views per day.
Jornalistas Livres has been a huge success. Their reports are gaining audiences. Mídia Ninja has established itself as the principal alternative audiovisual source in the country, consolidating its more than modern philosophy that the best information is direct information without filters. For this reason the Ninjas have shown demonstrations live all over the country.
But it is not only Ninja. CUT, UNE, university centers. All of them are creating, or improving in a very accelerated manner, their own means of communication, all united trying to breach the sinister wall of manipulation and lies which the mainstream media has created in Brazil between the facts and the people.
Returning to 18 March: it was absolutely incredible.
Globo’s manipulation to belittle 18 March has entered history as something similar to what they tried in Diretas Já, when Jornal Nacional, the principal Brazilian evening news program, lied to the Brazilian population, saying that it was demonstration for the anniversary of the city of São Paulo.
The golpista demonstrations of 13 March were overestimated and the anti-coup ones underestimated. To top this manipulation, Globo provided a percentage – a percentage! – of one manipulation over the other manipulation, to reach the infamous 7%!
In Lisbon, those demonstrating against the coup outnumbered those demonstrating for the coup.
In Rio, the anti-coup demonstration was much larger than the one of those supporting the coup. We took over Praça XV and the nearby streets! The golpistas took over Copacabana beach. I was at both demonstrations. The golpista demonstration was a closed, homogenous group, of middle class whites from Zona Sul.
The anti-coup demonstrations are much more plural. People from all social classes were there, from all neighborhoods, the peripheries, workers, students, intellectuals.
The golpista demonstrations were much more artificial: in Copacabana there were a large number of people holding posters printed and distributed by Habibs. Without wanting to diminish them, they are nevertheless people who limit themselves to demonstrating for a couple of hours on a Sunday.
The anti-coup demonstrations are more organic, happier, and thus become transformed into cultural acts. People occupy the squares for hours, celebrating democracy. There are no words of hate. No one wants the death or imprisonment or Aécio Neves. Messages against Sergio Moro are almost tender: all they are asking for is impartiality and good sense.
The anti-coup movement is becoming one of the largest mass movements experienced in the recent history of the country. But it has some important characteristics, which we need to highlight: it is not propelled by a specific political party, trade union, or social movement, much less by the government.
These are spontaneous horizons and they are increasing.
The democratic reaction to the coup is something extraordinary, and it has positively surprised all the analysts and political scientists. Most saw the coup as certain, as a tragedy announced.
Even myself, an inveterate, almost crazy, optimist was succumbing to pessimism.
Not now.
A light of hope has begun to shine.
Actually this is something incredible, almost unbelievable.
The scenario could not be worse for the progressive forces. A bad economy. Congress subjugated by a golpista gang and a reactionary and antidemocratic opposition. A weak government. A courageous president, but totally lacking in the gift of communication, and without a capacity to analyze the context. A juridical coup prepared in the minimum details through the establishment of a police state.
With all of this, we find ourselves once again facing a miracle.
Actually, I have said this before: the Dilma administration would only resist with a miracle.
This miracle is the democratic consciousness.
Of course, nothing has been won yet and in truth we are still losing. The mediatic-judicial conspiracy has accelerated. Lava Jato has launched a new operation every week, seeking to shape the national political agenda and to blackmail businessmen and politicians interned in the Guantanamo of Paraná – in search of new accusations which can subsidize the coup.
Inform on Lula! Help us overthrow the government! This is the constant threat to those imprisoned by Lava Jato.
Otherwise, life in prison, destruction of their companies, and now with a new phase of the operation the arrest of friends, partners, relatives.
There are so any illegalities, the arbitrariness, the lies, the manipulations, the illegal leaks, that Lava Jato should be entirely annulled. Other operations were for much less.
The mediatic-judicial dictatorship, which we are already living in, has entered a frenetic fascist spiral. For this reason, it is a relief that Lula’s case has been taken from the hands of Sergio Moro, who by now has gone completely crazy: at the same time that he receives serious criticism from the judicial and academic community, he is ever more incensed by Globo (Fantástico has come to treat him as a god).
Respected directors of law schools have called Sergio Moro a criminal. They state that he has committed an aggravated crime, by leaking the audios of Lula and Dilma, and should be charged and imprisoned for two to four years.
The media is trying at any cost to get the people on their side. The apocalyptic economic news has this sense. But it has not succeeded.
It is a difficult crisis because the mediatic coup is, as the dramatist Amir Haddad explained in an anti-coup event held yesterday in Fundição Progresso, a disease, a contagious virus.
Contaminated people appear to be mindless zombies. They no longer enter into dialogue. Instead they only repeat mediatic catchphrases. I witness this everyday, on my blog and the Cafezinho Facebook page. People repeat commonplaces, as if they had been transformed into robots by the media.
Dilma will have to deal with this problem in a more direct manner.
In relation to the STF, it is already very clear that there is a strong movement to intimate it and blackmail it. Globo will give a Faz Diferença prize to the next president of the STF, Carmen Lúcia. She should not accept it. This prize is a bribe. Much worse than a bribe, because it corrupts not only the judge who receives it, but the entire judicial system, which cannot be left to the mercy of the nobiliary hierarchies imposed by Globo, the greatest representative of this kleptocracy which has haunted Brazil for centuries.
It is sad to see supreme court judges when they are alone act in a cowardly manner.
When the whole court is in session, the cowardice continues, but it is reduced a little.
This is our hope, nevertheless, we cannot leave our trust in any institution.
All Brazilian institutions appear to be suffering from the blackmail of Globo, which does not hesitate to bare its fangs for all to see, as in the case of Rosa Weber, victim of insinuations as soon as she received Lula’s Habeas Corpus petition.
The democratic conscience of Brazil breathes strongly, with an accelerated heartbeat, though without sleeping properly.
It is a nervous and desperate conscience, because now we are sure that the coup orchestrated by the media and the conspiratorial sectors of the state was planned in a frighteningly meticulous manner. All the steps we take against the coup are met with new golpista moves.
Moreover, it is a sophisticated coup, which speaks in a difficult language and easily fools the people with its whipped up judicial language.
It is also armed, since a large part of the Federal Police has become the armed wing of the coup.
People have lost trust in democracy. Everyone, absolutely everyone, is afraid to be bugged by the Federal Police, which is total craziness, because this kills the spirit of liberty and trust in the constitutional guarantees which should prevail in the country.
The leak aimed at the president of the republic represented a violent attack on popular sovereignty.
The leaking of the intimate audios of the family of former president Lula represented a repugnant attack on political liberties and individual guarantees.
Everywhere we can see the recrudescence of something we never expected to see in Brazil: fascism in its pure and raw state. Children being attacked for using red t-shirts. Dogs attacked and their owners cursed for using red kerchiefs. People assaulted for their political positions. Party offices vandalized. Political assassinations of communist leaders.
Globo, a public concession, has not published any editorial against all of this: it is an accomplice of fascism.
A short while ago, the musician Lobão publicized the address of the son of Judge Teori Zavaski, as a way of threatening him: more fascism.
The editor of Época, Diego Escoteguy, put on his Twitter a threatening message against Judge Teori, stating that he would be a victim of violence. And he also cynically ended, that he was only ‘stating this.’ Editors of a communication group as large as Globo should be campaigning for political divergences not to degenerate into aggressions, especially aggressions against a supreme court judge!
Cynically stamping all the acts of fascism and violence we have seen, Globo and all the agencies submitted to the same logic, have shown themselves to be accomplices in a movement which, when it escapes from control, will hurt everyone, as can be seen in the aggression against Aécio Neves, the Secretary of Security of São Paulo, and the leader of the extreme rightist group Revoltados Online (who was cursed as a communist, petralha, and was almost physically attacked in the demonstration on Paulista Avenue).
Brazil needs peace, democracy, and respect for guarantees.
Não vai ter golpe! There will be no coup!
Translation by John Wayne.
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