A group of six researchers from the São Paulo Business Administration School of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV EAESP) and the University of Brasília (UnB) released this Monday (20) a survey on the resistance of federal employees to the government’s anti-democratic initiatives of former president Jair Bolsonaro. The actions had a series of implications for public agencies and, therefore, for serving the population. According to the study, the government increased the use of formal instruments of repression against civil servants and tested strategies in certain organizations to replicate them in others, in case of success.
Published in Brazilian Journal of Political Science, the document says that the servers came out ahead, at first, as they had the advantage of knowing the public machine. In this phase, the President of the Republic and appointees acted based on the so-called informal and collective strategies, as public criticism of civil servants, among other attitudes, is classified.
Among the formal instruments of repression are administrative disciplinary processes (PAD). With data obtained from the Comptroller General of the Union (CGU), the researchers show that, between 2019 and 2021, 171 PADs were opened, an average of 57 per year. From 2014 to 2018, before the Bolsonaro government, the total was 128, an average of 25.6 per year.
The government also strengthened the process of militarization of institutions, which began in environmental agencies, and reduced the autonomy of servers, with tools such as Technical Note 1,556/2020, by the CGU. The note allowed the federal public administration to adopt punishments against public servants who, on social networks or other virtual means, criticized the body to which they were subordinate. The understanding is that they had to fulfill a “duty of loyalty”. The Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) and the Green Party (PV) contested the measure, taking the issue to the Federal Supreme Court.
Another instrument of repression was to turn civil servants into “scapegoats”, since they served as an example to show what would happen to their colleagues if they opposed the orders. In relation to experiments that the federal government carried out to verify whether it would be successful with certain strategies, the researchers cite the restriction on access to the Electronic Information System (SEI), document and process management.
Formal strategies are those linked to institutional practice, to the use of official and legal mechanisms, such as decrees and normative instructions. According to one of the researchers in the study, FGV professor Gabriella Lotta, bureaucracy apparatuses are used against bureaucracy itself. “Either because you end up with the instruments, or because you give them another interpretation and revert them against the server. That’s what we ended up identifying: the use of the public machine, or trying to destroy it, or trying to reverse its operating tone in favor of this authoritarian project that President Bolsonaro was trying to do”.
On the other hand, there are informal strategies, which are in everyday interactions, such as speeches, text messages and informal conversations. Strategies are also divided into collective, when they affect a team, a sector or organization, or individual. At the beginning of the clashes, the civil servants opted more for individual maneuvers, “especially sabotage and changing the pace of work (shirking). These harmed government agendas in a silent and hidden way, out of the radar of senior management”, highlight the authors of the study. The civil servants also organized themselves collectively in order to take the denouncements outside public bodies, through testimonials, letters and undersigned, which also consists of an informal strategy.
Harassment
Researcher Michelle Morais de Sá e Silva, from the University of Oklahoma, United States, is the author of a study published in the book Institutional harassment in Brazil: the advance of authoritarianism and the deconstruction of the State in which gathered reports from employees of the federal administration. In an interview, she explained that her work did not have the goal of unraveling the harassment committed by the government, but rather identifying the personal values of employees of the federal public administration, but she ended up taking that path.
“When telling about their trajectories and actions in human rights issues, people started to report very difficult situations, depression, persecution, they reported a lot of fear. This made us seek a reflection on the need to register these processes”, he points out. .
According to her, the mere fact of seeing the institution they worked for being the target of an attack was a reason for employees to feel fear.
affront to education
An employee of the technical area of the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep) spoke, under the condition of anonymity, with the report of the Brazil Agency, and reported what he experienced there. He claims that the servers, because they have stability in function, prevented the practice of many abuses. “That was explicit. That commissioned person, who was not a civil servant, who was passing through there, did everything to implement the directives of the president of Inep and, ultimately, of the federal government. All the resistance that there was in there was from the stable servant , who tried to block these decisions. And this was done at the level of a meeting, a technical note, instruments in which we were able to expose, in more detail, the consequences of what they were doing”, he says.
Inep is linked to the Ministry of Education and is responsible for Enem. During his government, the then President of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro, even said that he would change the exam tests. Faced with the threats, the institute’s employees even handed over positions and sought transfers or licenses.
In order to protect themselves from bosses, Inep’s career servers sought support from the Association of Servers (Assinep). A Brazil Agency sought out Assinep for more details on possible actions taken by employees, in order to hold Bolsonaro-era bosses accountable. The entity did not respond to the contact.
Conflicts in public safety
Although he is not a federal servant, civil police officer Pedro Paulo Chaves Mattos, known as Pedro Chê, says that he himself had no bosses on his trail, but he noticed how relations changed with Bolsonaro at the Planalto Palace. As a PT member, he comments that colleagues suffered persecution, including institutional ones, and were even sent to other sectors, against his will. As a result, many of them reached self-censorship, cited by researchers in the study, or mental illness, according to Mattos.
“There was a case of a delegate telling a clerk that she would have to arrive an hour earlier than the others, because she was voting for Lula. Of course, she couldn’t arrive an hour earlier, because the police station would be closed, but that is part of It’s a game of blackmail and abuse. There are other colleagues who are relocated in the eye of the hurricane, in police stations that we know have no sympathy, because they are from the left”, exemplifies Mattos, who is a member of the National Council of Antifascism Police and works on the Large northern river.
A transsexual colleague, a federal employee of one of the police forces, was removed from field work and repositioned in a position in the administrative sector, with the function of providing telephone assistance. This caused the police officer embarrassment, since she was not called by her social name, of the female gender. “It caused a very heavy emotional damage, She was continually called sir, systematically, every day. There is this type of attack, of taking her weak point”, emphasizes the agent.
polarization and recovery
A specialist in studies on bureaucracy, Gabriela Lotta argues that the objective now should be to recover what was lost, “from documents, information, memory, procedure”, during the last administration of the federal government. “I think that little has been institutionalized, which does not allow for a reversal. Also because the Bolsonaro government, in terms of construction, has done very little. The main agenda was destruction”, she says.
For her, there is another “very delicate, very sensitive” issue. “The Bolsonaro government explained a polarization, which perhaps was always there and we didn’t know it, within the bureaucracy, but which has become an almost irreconcilable polarization, at this moment. the others, there are many people with mental health problems, leave from work due to these issues, unmotivated to be engaged. There is a very difficult job there, of rebuilding or building a unit, which is pro-organizational mission, of building a ability to work together, which has more to do with the dimension of people management.”
The researcher, however, does not suggest a solution. “But I have no doubt that this is something that has to be done. I think what is more dangerous is the polarization within the bureaucracy, and less to the Bolsonarist project”, she adds.
Other side
wanted by Brazil Agency, the press office of former president Jair Bolsonaro said, in a note, that the ministries were commanded by technical staff. “Directors and senior positions in public and mixed companies were occupied by renowned market executives. Secom [Secretaria Especial de Comunicação Social do Governo Federal] was led by a technician with more than 20 years of experience in the media”.
Fabio Wajngarten, former head of Secom, who is currently responsible for Bolsonaro’s advisory, also said that “in every process of drastic changes, groups come out in defense of their space”.
