Well, Democracy Now! recently spoke with Fernando Haddad, who ran against Bolsonaro with the Workers’ Party once Lula was barred from running. Bolsonaro beat him 55 to 45 percent. Haddad is Brazil’s former minister of education, the former mayor of São Paulo, one of the largest cities in the world. I began by asking Fernando Haddad about the comparisons between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump.
FERNANDO HADDAD: [translated] Bolsonaro is a tropical Trump. They have a very common agenda, a very regressive agenda, when it comes to civil rights, social rights and environmental rights.
But from the economic standpoint, there is a major difference between the two of them. Bolsonaro is adopting a regressive policy as regards rights, but a neoliberal policy when it comes to economic policy. Paulo Guedes, who you mentioned, who is going to be his minister of the economy, was trained at the University of Chicago. And he maintains the belief, his belief, in that sort of thinking, which was actually defeated by history, of total liberalization.
You talked about the massive state assets, particularly oil companies that are managed by the state today. Well, next year there’s likely to be a savage privatization of those assets and an unbound struggle against workers’ rights and social rights in Brazil, and gutting the public budget that protects the poorest of the poor and workers in relation to their employers.
So, from an economic standpoint, there is a difference that should be noted. Brazil is once again adopting a neoliberal agenda, a very strong neoliberal agenda, beyond what happened in the 1990s.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the Cabinet that Bolsonaro is putting together now, five former military officials serving in his Cabinet, praising the former military dictatorship?
FERNANDO HADDAD: [translated] It’s really unprecedented. Certainly, in Brazil, it’s very difficult to attain modern democracy with the appointment of so many military people, as is going to happen in the future administration of Bolsonaro. Therefore, it is an alliance that involves, externally, alignment with Trump policies, highly regressive, as I’ve indicated, from the economic standpoint, radicalized version of neoliberalism.
But I would also draw attention to Bolsonaro’s appreciation of a fundamentalist agenda from the standpoint of customs. He is very close to neo-Pentecostalism, which in Brazil recently has been adopting positions hostile towards political minorities in Brazil, but even against majorities, such as blacks and women. There are hostile messages in his discourse. And it would be very difficult for this to happen without strong military support. To be consistent with this discourse of lifting up the military dictatorship in Brazil, the dictatorship that extended from 1964 to 1985, Bolsonaro, his whole life, has been uplifting not only the dictatorship itself, but also the methods that the dictatorship used to stay in power, including torture.
AMY GOODMAN: Bolsonaro has threatened to destroy, imprison or banish political opponents. Certainly, you would be chief among them. You ran against him for president. And the man he was running against before, Lula, is in prison. Are you concerned?
FERNANDO HADDAD: [translated] I am more concerned about the consequences of Bolsonaro’s discourse on regular citizens than its impact on myself, because what is happening in Brazil is that regular folk—journalists, university professors, LGBT—members of the LGBT community—are all feeling insecure in Brazil. And my concern—well, I have sufficient means to protect myself. And those who get involved in politics in Latin America nowadays cannot be afraid of anything, because they really don’t have a right to be afraid. But my concern is with common citizens, common citizens who may be suffering anguish at this time because of no assurance for their lives on the part of the state. This is the problem that Brazil is facing.
And the resistance will also be based on those persons, because, Brazil, the situation is very complex. Forty-five percent of the voters, that I won, are going to organize and resist threats of that sort. So, I believe that in Brazil there will be, as there is in the United States, an organizing effort to defend rights that have been defended for 200 years in the Western world, the expansion of civil, political, social and environmental rights. Well, after 200 years of struggle, they can’t just disappear.
AMY GOODMAN: When you first came into our studio today and I asked you what you’re doing here in the United States, you said, well, Trump has been in power for two years; you guys are preparing for Bolsonaro. Talk about that, what that means to you.
FERNANDO HADDAD: [translated] Well, look, I consider the Trump administration to be serious backsliding in relation to what I believe is the objective of politics. The objective of politics is always to build scenarios in which persons’ horizons can be expanded evermore. Any political action that is aimed at restricting individuals’ horizons is, as I see it, a regressive action in relation to the political values that I embrace.
Bolsonaro, in that regard, is an ally of Trump. He is a person who is constantly announcing restrictions on rights. And I would include environmental rights in that. As I see it, the right to a healthy environment is a human right, because disrespecting the future of future generations—well, safeguarding the ability of future generations to live on a healthy planet is part of the expansion of horizons in Western democracies for ourselves and for future generations.
So, I would like to understand what’s happening in the United States. As a university professor, I foresaw Trump’s victory because of the movements I was observing around the world. I am a professor of political science. But I believe that the United States has become a laboratory for us, for us to organize an opposition, which is not opposition to the country, but rather in favor of humanism, in favor of the human species, in favor of expanding the space for freedom and for the emancipation of each and every one of us.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Brazil’s indigenous people. The Amazon is about the environment and also about the indigenous people of Brazil, in the Amazon and beyond. Bolsonaro once said, “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated their Indians.” Fernando Haddad?
FERNANDO HADDAD: [translated] As you noted, and quite rightly so, the indigenous question and the environmental question are intimately interconnected in Brazil, because the best way we have found to preserve our forests was precisely to preserve the indigenous reserves. There is an intimate connection between the deforestation of the Amazon that occurred throughout the 20th century and the question of indigenous peoples’ rights to self-preservation. When the new administration has announced that it’s going to step out of the climate agreement and stop demarcating indigenous lands, well, those two are totally interconnected.
There is resistance to this in Brazil, even on the part of the most lucid leaders of agribusiness, because the more lucid persons in agribusiness understand that the certification of our products depends on environmental certification, that our buyers will continue to be—will not be attracted to us anymore if we don’t maintain a commitment to the climate. A part of those who buy Brazilian products are interested in knowing where those products come from and how they’re being produced. Now, if we, to the contrary, gamble on deforestation to expand the agricultural frontier, which is totally unnecessary—we have enough open land to produce more without having to fell a single tree—if we do this, we might even be compromising our foreign policy agenda, so nor would we have any economic gain by this agenda proposed by Bolsonaro.
But there is a reaction in Brazil. He had announced that he was going to do away with the Ministry of the Environment, but he had to step back from that decision, precisely because of the commitment to the environment on the part of a large part of our society. So, we cannot consider anything lost. We have to resist all of those regressive proposals and clarify to society what it is that is at stake, because they have not even pointed out short-term economic gains from that proposal.
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Fernando Haddad
former mayor of São Paulo and former Brazilian presidential candidate for the Workers’ Party, or PT.
— source democracynow.org | Jan 02, 2019