The original comment is likely a troll, but the current goverment did place a bunch of amateur hacks on the highest positions of power, which led to things like the minister of culture asserting to the public that woman belongs in the kitchen, or that the minister of education asserting in public that the humanities like sociology and history must disappear from the face of earth, and the ministry of environment saying in a leaked video of a presidential meeting that thanks to covid they now had the distraction they needed to kill indians and give the land to soy farmers.
So, even if trollish comment, it is not too removed from truth. I can see how incompetence, cost cuts, corruption and favoritism (he did place all his sons in a trump-like fashion in his cabinet) might have led to this. Not to mention relaxing of oversight and the rule of law which allowed for even more departments (and the private companies working for those) to hold and share this information without concerns.
The previous government (removed illegitimacy in a coup) did place emphasis on digital security. Brazil have safe electronic voting for decades and Brazilians receive a java application by the gov to do their taxes since the 90s. The current gov was elected on the basis of "we will undo everything the last <<corrupt>> government did"
> The previous government (removed illegitimacy in a coup)
Dilma was impeached and removed, Temer finished her term, then Bolsonaro won the election after getting stabbed, and nearly killed, by opposition supporters. I know he's highly controversial, but he did win the election.
The removal of Dilma is not normally what one would describe as a "coup." The military junta from 1969, however, is.
What you are describing is a "hard coup", while in the case of Dilma it was what can be described as a "soft coup"..
Yes the congress followed all the legal proceedings, but in the end they did not proved that the accounting maneuver her government did was illegal and therefore unfit to what could be called as a legal impeachment proceeding.
If you add this to everything that was happening behind the curtains, and history will make this even more clear, yes it was a coup, just that, this is of a different sort.
(BTW a lot of important players of the time are starting to confess everything they did, and how dirty it was)
Imagine that without any legal proof, the legislative chamber can throw out any legitimate president basically nullifying the people wish and therefore, the democracy. Also this will make the legislative power, the most powerful one over the two others, going against the three power(separation of powers) concept of Montesquieu.
That's why the impeachment proceeding cannot be only based in political grounds, but also need a clear legal basis on the government doing something wrong based on the current legal framework.
In the case of Dilma, only the political axis was at play, and a dirty one i must say, where they didn't respect the legal grounds and in the end there was no proof of her wrongdoing's.
> What you are describing is a "hard coup", while in the case of Dilma it was what can be described as a "soft coup"..
That is inventing new words and definitions for your convenience. It cuts both ways, one can say it was a "democratic coup", a "constitutional coup", a "popular coup" (more than 60% of the population in favour), a "coup against tyranny and poverty" (worst reduction in GDP in 120 years), etc.
Listen to one of our most respected historians, https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Aar%C3%A3o_Reis , an academic awarded for his work on dictatorship and democracy, who also fought against our dictatorship in a guerrilla war, founded the PT, Dilma's party, and worked in many of the PT governments: it was not a coup.
> Listen to one of our most respected historians ...
Mentioning "O Globo" article from 2016, a news media that was part of the package that severely supported the coup, by constant manipulation of brazil's popular opinion, being one of the most influential TV channels of Brazil. A support that paved the way for Bolsonaro and all the right wing lunatics that are in power right now.
Also "one of our most respected historians", IDK, not from the field, but never heard of him. Maybe i should take from granted something he says over our past, but historians have not the best kind of training to understand the present time, sociologists and philosophers can do much better. Also knowing how 'Globo' works, it must have been hard to find a guy from social sciences that would corroborate with their distorted and manipulated point of view (And some point in time they will have to make a historical repair over all the wrongdoings in this case).
Marco Antonio Villa for instance is a well known historian, but is clearly a right wing supporter, with a clear political view and agenda, despite being against Bolsonaro nowadays. So there's no way to resort to prestige in the field and yet somehow say it have anything to do with objectivity, because we know this is not how it works in real life.
On the other way i can present you a lot of current newspapers pieces that say exactly the opposite. There is a trend now, that even people that supported this in the past, is starting to show a changed opinion about the subject, as the blind hate over Lula or PT is starting to make less sense nowadays, when all this had lead to this suffocating reality we are living.
> Lula, Dilma and her party tried to impeach Social Democrat President Fernando Henrique 45 (forty five!) times.
> By your own definition, they tried 45 coups, making them the biggest coupists in Brasil's history.
Don't know if those are the real numbers, but anyway, taking them for granted, none of them was approved, so it doesnt matter if it was 10, 100 or 1000. You are comparing oranges and apples here.
The only way to be comparable, it would be if one of them got approved, and without any legal grounds being proved, removed Fernando Henrique from his legitimate presidency. Than yes, i would say it would be a "soft coup", because it needs the green light from a lot of important people for this to happen without the right guidance under the law.
Because that's how you cook a coup that have the appearance of legitimacy, but once anyone digs enough, can see the how much it was flawed and corrupted from the very start (for instance, it started as a form of 'Cunha' blackmailing the president to stop the investigations on his corruption cases).
Even if you say the ouster of Dilma was illegitimate, there's the fact that her VP served out the rest of her term, then the party lost the next election. There's no "coup" because there was no loss of power by anything other than the democratic process.
Now of course there have been all sorts of dirty political dealings, those just aren't described by the word "coup." That said, if some day Bolsonaro or others forms a new junta, then I will agree with you at that later time. But that day is not today, unless I am slow in receiving news of a newly formed junta.
with the running candidate jailed with obviously fabricated evidence and released last year with no conviction. All the while with whatsapp campaigns promoting pizza-gate like conspiracies.
> her VP served out the rest of her term
that I fully blame on the party picking an extremely right wing to be able to get elected. But don't make the soft coup less of a coup. The VP was choose to get support from the farmers and religious groups that control most of the interior of the country, and they payed the price for that.
If it does, I didn't get my 50 Mao cents for posting. And you'd think China would support the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Worker's Party) ideologically, but it's their Mao cents, not mine.
Lula was convicted twice, he only got freed from jail because of a new legal ruling that said that you can't be jailed until all appeals have been heard. That's... not the same as "no convictions" even if you want to claim the judges were both biased.
And I'm not aware of anyone accusing Lula of being a pedophile, though maybe someone did? Everything I remember hearing blamed him for robbing Petrobras. You sure you're not getting Lula confused with "João de Deus"? I thought he was the one who was raping people.
Your article refers to the "regime semiaberto" that Lula was offered after completing one sixth of his sentence. This was prior to the Brazilian Supreme Court ruling that released him on 8 November 2019. His case is still pending before the Supremo Tribunal Federal.
Translating: Lula could go on probation but deliberately chose to remain imprisoned because he did not '[...] recognized any legitimacy of the process which condemned him[...]'.
The supreme court then ruled that "you can't be jailed until all appeals have been heard". Only then he decided to get out of prison.
I don't think we're disagreeing with each other at this point. He was only actually freed by the supreme court ruling that he could not be jailed until all appeals (of which there are many) were exhausted.
Regime semiaberto is roughly equivalent to being allowed to go out under house arrest and wouldn't have changed his conditions much.
