Julio Hernández López: Shipyard

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eu in San Miguel del West, in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, in front of the 14th Mechanized Cavalry Regiment barracks. Several hundred supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, the candidate defeated in his consecutive re-election bid, demanded, as other Bolsonarists were doing in other parts of the country, that the military prevent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from coming to power and keep Bolsonaro as President of the Republic. At the end, when it was time to sing his anthem, the crowd extended their right arms to the front, in an open Nazi salute.

Santa Catarina is one of the 26 states that make up the Federative Republic of Brazil, plus the Federal District. Its inhabitants are mainly descendants of Europeans (87 percent); 47 percent of these are of German and Austrian descent. Its capital, Florianopolis, is the second most visited city in Brazil.

With more than six million inhabitants, Santa Catarina is “at the top of the ranking Brazilian human and economic development”, with a population of European colonization with a high rate of education and skilled labor. It has 67 percent above the national average of Gross Domestic Product and a growth rate 5.8 above the national average, and it is estimated that it will continue until 2025 (Santa Catarina Industrial Land: https://bit.ly/3Dxn2am).

What happened in San Miguel del Oeste is a sign of the spirit and ideology that moves a part of those in Brazil who are invoking a coup d’état to block the path to communismthe socialism or the danger that they believe will mean the arrival of Lula to the presidency of the Republic.

The outgoing president, Bolsonaro, is playing a kind of general vagueness with particular concessions. He has not ignored Lula’s victory, but he has not recognized it either, maintaining the flexible position of saying that he will follow the constitutional line. He has not expressly encouraged his supporters to civil resistance (truckers blocked hundreds of highway locations) nor to the coup requested before the barracks, but he was slow to ask (he did it last night) that they be evicted highways and justified the mobilizations, the most notable are those calling for a military coup) by considering them part of the democratic game.

What is happening in Brazil offers necessary readings for the Mexican process called the Fourth Transformation. The right and the extreme right accuse their opponents of anti-democracy, authoritarianism and lack of respect for official results but, when the time comes, they act not only in terms of strong civil resistance but also open calls for a military coup, with Hitlerian invocations and expressions.

Bolsonaro, that is, the Brazilian right and extreme right, are betting on exacerbating political and social sentiments to obstruct the presidential exercise of Lula, who already has a difficult outlook in the face of the predominance of his opponents in the federal Congress and in most state governments, including the most important in terms of demographics and economy.

There is no formal complaint of electoral fraud in Brazil and until now the system, which includes electronic voting, has been considered reliable. What moves Bolsonarism is an open rejection of the results that were not favorable to it, through a radical objection based on a supremacism wishing to sweep away, exterminate, what they consider dangers for brazil. Does it sound like something similar to the reader?

And, while Joe Biden, six days before the midterm elections in the United States, has warned of the deniers electoral, Republican tending to ignore results if they are not favorable, which could lead to political violence and a situation harmful, corrosive and destructiveuntil tomorrow!

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