March to Elected Autocracy – Brazil

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is firmly entrenched as an authoritarian but elected president dedicated to encouraging extra-judicial killings of drug users and dealers by local vigilantes or police authorities. He has silenced critics, crushed the free press and seared his populist control into every facet of Philippine life. This island nation has a track record of electing such brutish leaders – remember the Marcos regime?

In Hungary, recently reelected populist president Viktor Orbán, a virulent opponent of immigration, has so decimated free speech and reconfigured his country’s legal system that the entire nation now faces sanctions from the European Union itself. “Orban has taken near total control over Hungary's news media. He has used financial pressure to silence independent outlets and has consolidated the rest to create a state media machine that is loyal to him. 

“Orban has also radically changed Hungary's courts, relentlessly chipping away at judicial independence. In 2018, he created an alternative court system that gives his executive branch power over the judiciary, where Orban himself can pick and choose his own judges. 

“In another move that was bitterly criticized by proponents of free speech, Orban recently closed Central European University in Budapest because it received funding from its founder, the Hungarian-native billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Critics have pointed to Orban's demonization campaign against Soros as being filled with anti-Semitic tropes and false accusations.” CBSNews.com, May 13^th.  

It’s becoming a global epidemic, electing authoritarian leaders, even here in the United States. An “acquitted” impeached president is wreaking as much havoc as he can against anyone who may have participated, however truthfully, with pressing the case against him. He believes himself to be so far above the law that he can dictate leniency and even pardons for his political cronies who have committed felonies to support him. He has chastised his own Attorney General for thinking otherwise. Mainstream media still remains, in the President’s words, the “enemy of the people.”

But what we are seeing – autocrats who achieve power through democratic elections – is a growing pattern that has devastated once thriving democracies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You can see additional supporting details in my January 15^th Can a Constitution Based on Honor and Trust Still Work? blog. We just did not expect the United States to fall into that category. That’s Africa or Latin America, right? Like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.  Not the United States of America. Right?

While banana republics and corrupt dictators have endured this patterned behavior for most of modern history in South America, a reaction to corruption at the top of what was thought to be a democratically elected government gave rise to anger in a majority of Brazilians. Their response is similar to the frustrations of voters in many nations. Brazil elected an ultra-right wing probusiness autocrat to clean house. President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office on January 1, 2019

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Boldonsaro has clamped down on the press, blamed and arrested those who have criticized him and launched into vitriolic attacks against even international leaders who had offered him help to extinguish raging fires, decimating Brazil’s oxygen-creating Amazon forests. He continues in his offensive denial of climate change itself. His very election campaign was to reclaim massive portions of the Amazon jungle for commercial use: mining, oil extraction and creating new farmland. That is was Jair Bolsonaro himself who ordered those fires, to clear out forested land for these other uses, was met with government denial… although even his local supporters knew that was true. To put it mildly, those set fires soon exploded out of control. Even the jungle rainfall could not stem the damage.

Conservation charities (non-governmental organizations or NGOs) and foreign governments have pleaded with Bolsonaro to preserve plant-rich Amazonia in the global battle to convert carbon emissions into oxygen, knowing that Brazil’s rain forests are the largest remaining accumulations of trees able to make that contribution. Bolsonaro lashed out at both these foreign governments and the NGOs to mind their own business, that Brazil was quite capable of taking care of its own crises. But since it was Bolsonaro who caused this, like our own President, he needed to find others to blame that he could crush and punish. Scapegoats. His choice of victims is astounding.

“Last summer, as fires were raging and French President Emmanuel Macron called on wealthy nations to help put them out, Bolsonaro demanded an apology and rejected offers of international aid… Some of his worst scorn has been reserved for nongovernmental organizations, which often team up with indigenous communities to protect the Amazon.

“During his campaign for president, he vowed that such NGOS would get no government funding and that indigenous communities would not get ‘one centimeter’ of protected land… Though scientists have attributed the fires in the Amazon to efforts to clear forest for farming and other uses, Bolsonaro has suggested that NGOs could be setting the fires in retaliation for losing funds under his administration.

“[Then Bolsonaro begin accusing and demanding the arrest of the firefighters themselves… as arsonists!] The morning after police in the state of Para arrested the brigadistas, as the volunteer firefighters are known, Bolsonaro tweeted: ‘In October, I declared that many fires could be linked to NGOs. Now the Para police are arresting some suspects for the crime.’

“That same day, federal prosecutors investigating the fires issued a news release stating that they found no evidence that ‘pointed to the participation of brigadiers or civil society organizations.’… Two days after the firefighters were arrested, the same local judge who authorized the ‘preventive detention’ of the brigadistas determined it was no longer necessary and released the four men while the investigation continued.

“They walked out of jail with shaved heads holding hands and were greeted by their families and television cameras… Police in Para say the evidence against the firefighters includes wiretaps as well as a video that purportedly shows members of the brigade starting a fire… The video, according to the police, was discovered on YouTube but has since been taken down and was not shared with the media.” Los Angeles Times, February 17^th. Sound familiar? Internet spread conspiracy theories anyone? A tweeting president blaming innocent scapegoats for his nation’s ailments, some caused directly by his own policies? Autocratic solutions for everything?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and as history has so often proved, democracy is fragile institution that requires competent, trustworthy and honest leaders to keep it alive and make it work.