Prospective Terror in the Tropics: a new Brazilian LGBTI holocaust?

It seemed like a brief reprieve. Many who have been following the current election cycle in Brazil watched with deep apprehension. Jair Bolsonaro of the “Social Liberal Pary” (PSL) led the October 7, 2018 presidential election by almost 16 percentage points. But achieving only 46% of the vote, he fell just short of the 50% Brazilian law requires to advance to the presidency without a runoff, now scheduled for October 28.¹

Bolsonaro dominated in the 3 largest cities of Brazil: the national capital, Brasilia; Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. He took 16 of the nation states while his nearest opponent, Fernando Haddad, won most of the northeast with 29.3% of the national vote including Pará, Maranhão, Piauí, Rio Grandi Do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia. One other candidate, Ciro Gomes, took Ceará, receiving 12.5% of the vote nationally.²

Looking at the numbers at face value it appears that Bolsonaro should easily win the runoff, and that’s exactly where so much apprehension festers. Both Haddad and Gomes back LGBTI causes. But despite being the candidate of the Social Liberal Party, Bolsonaro is no liberal. Instead he represents the extreme Right, exploiting national anger against the scandalized Left. Bolsonaro’s campaign marked him as notably racist, sexist, and homophobic with a position beholden to the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, but at the same time he criticized it, stating in 2016, “The dictatorship’s mistake was to torture but not kill.”³

In short, many fear a bloodbath with the full backing of Evangelicals and business leaders.

WHY BRAZIL? WHY NOW?

The rise of a fiery candidate like Bolsonaro may have been made more possible by the rise of Trump in the United States, but the dynamics in Brazil are different. The administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whom many simply refer to as “Lula”, had put Brazil upon a path to prosperity, and through the national petroleum company, Petrobras, was turning Brazil into an energy producing giant.⁴

Then came the great spoiler in March 2014: the operation code named “Lava Jato” (Operation Car Wash). It began with Federal Police surveillance of a gas and car wash facility in Brasilia in an attempt to catch the “money launderer of money launderers,” Alberto Yousef. But when Federal Police intercepted an e-mail from Yousef that claimed he was paying for a luxury vehicle for Paulo Roberto Costa of Petrobas, the investigation exploded into a massive criminal probe that could be likened to the fall of a hundred dominoes. They determined that the money laundered by this ring involving Petrobas amounted to the equivalent of US$8 million.⁵

But that would only be the beginning of an international shake-up.

This money laundering scheme actually consisted of an entire cartel of companies that did business with Petrobras including Odebrecht, Latin America’s largest construction company. Odebrecht ran a division they called “Structured Operations.” It ran its own accounting system away from government scrutiny and even a “bank” by which it bribed executives and politicians who placed representatives of Odebrecht and Petrobas in power. It grew as a result of a festering flaw in Brazil that also recurs in many countries: if you want to get anything done, you must pay a bribe to expedite it. In the case of Odebrecht and Petrobras, the unfolding scandal has implicated dozens of congressmembers, senators, and ministers. The scandal also implicated President da Silva and his successor Dilma Rouseff who was impeached in 2016. Da Silva himself was charged with corruption.⁶

The United States began its own investigation through the Department of Justice in late 2016. Switzerland also assigned its own investigators. They discovered how shockingly widespread the corruption extended: 14 countries including Columbia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, and Panama, each case reaching into upper echelons of power and making use of the U.S. economic system. Through bribery, these countries paid exorbitant prices for contract deals. If anyone was required to pay a fine, the fine would amount to a small fraction of the profit, a mere slap on the wrist. But as investigations uncovered the extent of the corruption, the economies of the affected countries suffered.⁷

The ensuing turmoil also turned Brazilian sentiment against the party of Da Silva: the Worker’s Party. This resentment sent the electorate careening toward the hard Right.

HOPE AMID BITTER HATREDS

Brazil’s record of violence is intense. The New York Times reported 63,880 people murdered nationwide in 2017, up 3 percent from 2016. 5,144 were killed by police.⁸

Many observing the International Transgender Day of Remembrance have noted a disproportionately high rate of violence and murder against transpeople in Brazil in recent years. But transpeople haven’t been the only victims. In 2017, Grupo Gay de Bahia noted 387 murders and 58 suicides of LGBTI peoples generally, a spike of about 30% nationwide. The president of Grupo Gay de Bahia, anthropologist Luiz Mott, told The Guardian the spike in violence is linked to the prominence of ultraconservative politicians linked to Evangelicals in the Brazilian congress. Television programs conflate homosexuals with the devil, promoting what Mott described as “a discourse that destroys solidarity and equates LGBT people to animals.”⁹

Such a link mirrors the political influence of Evangelicals in the United States, especially parachurch entities like the Family Research Network and Liberty Counsel who enjoy great clout in the Trump White House. Both organizations have purposed to suppress same sex marriage and to criminalize transpeople. These organizations capitalized upon a popular outcry within Evangelical churches when then President Barack Obama issued his guidelines for greater acceptance of transpeople. Most Evangelicals regard transpeople categorically as an “abomination” and discriminate accordingly in the name of God and “religious liberty.” Add extremist influencers like Steve Bannon who gained prominence through the “Alt Right” publication Breitbart before holding a White House job. Include the rise of racially charged organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation, many of which consist of Evangelicals. What do we get? Today’s GOP, a party that has evolved closer to theocracy since the years of Ronald Reagan, and leans far more to the Right than Abraham Lincoln.¹⁰

Brazil’s LGBTI peoples filed 725 complaints of violence and discrimination in the first half of 2017 alone. Then a video of the beating of transwoman Dandara dos Santos appeared on YouTube, shocking the world. Police delayed action, leaving her to plead for her life as her assailants carted her broken body away to her death in a wheelbarrow. Arrests only took place in response to popular pressure.¹¹

A federal judge in Brazil also overruled a previous decision by the Federal Council of Psychology banning conversion therapy, a reversal for which the council appealed.¹²

But despite Brazil’s turmoil from the Right, that nation’s Supreme Court decided in March, 2018 to allow transpeople to update gender markers on their documents even without surgery. The National Security Council approved procedures for doing so on June 28.¹³

Then, possibly emboldened by the success of trans candidates in the United States,¹⁴ transpeople ran for local, state, and federal positions. The Brazilian National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA) announced that 17 trans candidates ran for the national Congress, 33 for state congressional positions, 2 for district congressional positions, and 1 for the Senate… 53 altogether.¹⁵

The move signaled a new ray of hope and determination for transpeople.

THE REACTIONARY FAR RIGHT CANDIDATE

But in the same election cycle, Jair Bolsonaro seeks the presidency. His website declares that he believes in free enterprise and the right to bear arms. He supports “stronger discipline” in schools and opposes parole, “oversexualized content” in media, and wants to terminate all sex education in schools. He wants to cut the number of judicial ministries in half and all new ministers must submit to a litmus test of his own values. He wants to reduce public debt by means of privatization and accelerate investment in munitions.¹⁶

Readers examining his position may question, “Who’s right to bear arms? What is ‘stronger discipline? What constitutes ‘oversexualization’?” The terms he uses are overgeneralized, and overgeneralization leads to disparity in understanding. Is it appropriate for an already violent society to solve its problems through greater proliferation of guns, and is this right to be offered to all or only the part of society of which Bolsonaro approves? Those kinds of questions not only strike at constitutionality within Brazil, but echo similar questions in the United States.

Critics paint a picture of a monster, comparing Bolsonaro to Donald Trump and Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte. Unlike Trump, who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War,¹⁷ Bolsonaro graduated from military academy in 1977 and served in the Army as a captain. He won a congressional seat in 1990. His outrageous remarks included him flashing an image of sexist machismo to Congressmember Maria do Rosario in 2014, “I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it.” In another interview in 2011 he said,

“I’d be incapable of loving a homosexual son … I’d prefer my son to die in an accident than show up with a moustachioed man.”¹⁸

He also falsely claimed that 90% of children adopted by LGBTI people would be exploited as “sex slaves,” and concluded on the basis of that presumption that the legalization of same-sex marriage “legalizes child abuse.” He said, “If I saw two guys holding hands I’d beat them up.”¹⁹

He said, “I’m pro-torture and so are the people.” He also declared:

“You won’t change anything in this country through voting– nothing, absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, you’ll only change things by having a civil war and doing the work the military regime didn’t do. Killing 30,000, starting with FHC… If a few innocent people die, that’s okay.” FHC refers to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a previous president in Brazil who ordered demarcation of indigenous lands to help the indigenous population.²⁰

It’s this inflammatory speech that typifies what has been wrong in Brazil and the international far Right movement. The threat seems clear to many: a Bolsonaro administration may become the greatest threat to human rights in Brazil since the dictatorship, especially the rights of minorities including those LGBTI. It could mean a new “Dirty War” on a scale comparable to that of Argentina in the 1970’s and 1980’s. His racism directly turned against Indigenous and Black citizens thus:

“If it’s up to me, every citizen will have a gun at home. Not one centimeter will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas.”²¹

Bolsonaro may get the civil war he desires.

THE OFFICIAL FROM THE QUILOMBO

“Quilombolas” refers to those who reside in a quilombo. While Rioplatanese Spanish equates “quilombo” negatively to a “brothel”, its Brazilian meaning has a deeper history of a community struggling for survival and liberty, going back to the slave trade that sustained Brazil till that country abolished the practice in 1888. An estimated 40% of Native Africans abducted in the European slave trade landed in Brazil. Slaves sought relief and autonomy in many ways. Some fled their captors and formed distant runaway slave communities, some of which referring to their communities as “quilombos”. Their existence was noted as early as 1645 in the journal of Captain Johann Blier, an officer among Dutch colonists who then controlled what is now the state of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil and who were the first of the European nations to build a transatlantic slave trade. Captain Blier described the quilombo “Old Palamares” in contrast to a “New Palamares” that had revitalized after raids upon the first quilombo. Other quilombos were later identified in the 1770’s: Acotirene, Andalaquituche, Dambraganga, Macaco, Osenga, Subupira, Tabocas, and Zumbi.²²

Quilombos, despite the lack of class consciousness among residents, began to be popularly associated with Marxism in the 1950’s. But that reputation persisted in Brazilian society, especially where self-identified quilombos became established in urban centers.²³

One self-described “quilombola” is Afro-Brazlian activist and community leader, Érica Malunguinho, one of the 53 transgender candidates in the October 7 election. She won a state congressional office in São Paulo in a state Bolsonaro won in the same election.²⁴

The Congressmember Elect described the quilombo she founded, Aparelha Luzia, thus to Afropunk:

“It’s not a space for just partying. It’s a place of constant production of Black intellectualism and militancy. It’s a center of black intelligence. It’s a place where all of the narratives of Blackness meet to think about everything in the world.”²⁵

It also does something else. It fixates the philosophical ideal of a quilombo, and unfortunately, reinforces the Leftist image for which quilombos had become stereotypically famous. She’s a teacher of history and art, a member of the Socialism and Liberty Party and born in Pernambuco where we find our earliest examples of quilombos. She ran on the platform of promoting tourism in indigenous areas to help those people out of poverty, and to help generate jobs for transpeople.²⁶

This agenda will certainly make her a target in a Bolsonaro presidency. Érica Malunguinho represents everything Jair Bolosonaro hates: Black, trans, politically Left, civil rights activist, supporter of indigenous people, community organizer, opposition legislator, and free thinking idealogue.

If Bolsonaro wins, Ms. Malunguinho will be a key person to watch.

THE HADDAD CHALLENGE

The only other candidate who stands any chance of overcoming Bolsonaro is Fernando Haddad of the Worker’s Party, selected by the party to replace Lula after the court barred him from running for office pursuant to his conviction in the wake of the Car Wash scandal.²⁷

Haddad is of Lebanese descent and born in São Paulo to a family of immigrants. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of São Paulo majoring in Civil Law. He also earned a Master’s degree in Economics and a Doctorate in Philosophy. He served as Sub-Secretary of Finance and Economic Development of São Paulo, Education Minister under Presidents Da Silva and Rouseff, and served as Mayor of São Paulo.²⁸

Haddad comes to the presidential race as a newcomer. In fact, he only became a candidate less than a month before the election. Lula threw his support behind Haddad in a letter to the Brazilian people which stated:

“A man can be unfairly incarcerated, but his ideas cannot. No oppressor can be bigger than the people. That is why our ideas will reach everyone through the voice of the people, louder and stronger than the lies spread by Globo.

“So, it is from my heart that I wish to ask all those who would vote for me to vote in my brother Fernando Haddad for President of the Republic. And to ask you to vote in our gubernatorial candidates, in our candidates running for representatives and senators, so that we can build a more democratic country, with sovereignty, without privatization of public companies, with more social justice, more education, culture, science and technology, more safety, housing and health, with more employment, decent wages, and with land reform.

“Today, we have become millions of Lulas and, from now on, Fernando Haddad will be Lula for millions of Brazilians.”²⁹

Haddad has promised to introduce Transcidadania, a program developed in São Paulo for the purpose of providing grants to trans individuals to they can fulfill their educational requirements and obtain professional training. He intends to criminalize homophobia and transphobia, saying that Bolsonaro has a “psychological problem.”³⁰

Haddad’s agenda puts new light on Bolsonaro’s remark, “Not one centimetre will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas.”³¹ People like Ms. Malunguinho constituents would be the very beneficiaries Bolsonaro wants to destroy.

Notwithstanding, Haddad and the other candidates condemned the September 6 attack on Jair Bolsonaro that sent him to a hospital in Juiz de Fora in the state of Minas Gerais. The assailant, Adelio Bispo de Oliveira stabbed Bolsonaro, claiming he was “carrying out God’s order” by stabbing Bolsonaro. The attack played upon public sympathy, strengthening Bolsonaro’s position.³²

AN END TO BRAZILIAN DEMOCRACY?

For Brazilians, democracy itself hangs in the balance. According to Slate magazine, quoting Lilia M. Schwarcz, Bolsonaro’s advisors are determined to draw up a new constitution which would not represent a constitution of the consensus of the electorate, but the documents by and for a special elite. She also voiced her expectations that Bolsonaro will initiate burnings of any textbook that speaks of Brazil having been taken over by a coup de état or teaches about human sexuality in any capacity.³³

What do business leaders think about the Bolsonaro candidacy? The rich dislike the economic policies of the Worker’s Party, especially after the Car Wash scandal. But they like the idea of Bolsonaro’s plan to name a banker as head of his economic team. While business leaders don’t consider Bolsonaro to be a political plum, they see him as less risky to their bottom line than Haddad.³⁴

But more importantly, Bolsonaro’s fiery rhetoric plays well to the highly political Evangelical Alliance who for decades have desired the total obliteration of LGBTI peoples, and their erasure from public memory.

The ongoing blood that pours as rivers in Brazil may indeed crescendo to alarming proportions, and this is promised in the candidacy of Bolsonaro. Astonishingly, his party would not have advanced without a growing desire for dictatorship and backing of Evangelicals and business leaders. If indeed we see a bloodbath as many expect to happen, we could imagine the figure of Christ the Redeemer who looks over the crime-stained neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro with an offer of embrace; but again reaching out his hands, this time in utter shock at the impending blood and death offering made to the Prince of Peace as if he were a bloodthirsty Moloch.

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REFERENCES:

Featured Image: Christ the Redeemer stretches out his hands as if his embrace has become a gesture of disbelief (Flickr: Mike Vondran, altered), stream of water turned to blood (Windows public image, altered) over a general map of Brazil (by the author). The motto “Ordem e Progresso” (Order and Progress) is that from the flag of Brazil.

It should be noted that the writer of this article has never been a member of any political party in any election in which she has voted since 1974, and so her perspective does not follow a party affiliation.

(n.a.) “Jair Bolsonaro: Far-right candidate wins first round of Brazil election” BBC News, Latin America (October 8, 2018) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45780176
Ibid.
Adam Forrest. “Jair Bolsonaro: the worst quotes from Brazil’s far-right presidential frontrunner” The Independent (October 9, 2018) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jair-bolsonaro-who-is-quotes-brazil-president-election-run-off-latest-a8573901.html.
CBS News. “Brazil’s Rising Star” YouTube (Report by Steve Kroft December 12, 2010, accessed October 10, 2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co1cwVXhHQc.
Luis del Valle. “Exporting corruption: Beyond Brazil’s Car Wash scandal” Al Jazeera (March 10, 2018, accessed October 9, 2018) https://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/americas/2018/03/exporting-corruption-brazil-car-wash0scandal180307110441253.html.
Ibid.
Anthony Faiola. “The corruption scandal started in Brazil. Now it’s wreaking havoc in Peru.” Washington Post (January 23, 2018) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-corruption-scandal-started -in-brazil-now-its-wreaking-havoc-in-peru/2018/01/23/0f9bc4ca-fad2-11e7-9b5d-bbf0da31214d_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.144b71ae5267.
Shasta Darlington. “A Year of Violence Sees Brazil’s Murder Rate Hit Record High” New York Times (August 10, 2018, accessed October 10, 2018) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/world/americas/brazil-murder-rate-record.html
Sam Cowie. “Violent deaths of LGBT people in Brazil hit all-time high” The Guardian (January 22, 2018, accessed October 9, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/brazil-lgbt-violence-deaths-all-time-high-new-research.
Lynnea Urania Stuart. “The Summer of Seventeen” Transpire (August 1, 2017, accessed October 10, 2018) https://lynneauraniastuart.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/the-summer-of-seventeen/.