Brazils’s far-right president offers a very strange interpretation of history
ON MARCH 31ST 1964 Brazilian soldiers stationed in the south-eastern city of Juiz de Fora began to march toward Rio de Janeiro, marking the start of a military coup. In the days that followed, João Goulart, the democratically elected president, fled to Uruguay. He was replaced by a general. Many ordinary Brazilians backed the soldiers, believing that Goulart, a populist left-winger, was planning a coup of his own to install a government inspired by the Peronism of neighbouring Argentina.
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president, recently ordered the army to commemorate the coup. In instructions to commanders, his defence minister described the dictatorship as a legitimate response to “the clamour of the ample majority of the population” in the face of leftist extremism. This enraged victims of the military regime, politicians who served in democratic governments and human-rights groups. They appealed to the courts to block the commemorations.
Mr Bolsonaro’s admiration for the dictatorship stems in part from his antipathy for the political left, which he deems to be a source of immorality and corruption. So strong is his aversion that he declared on a recent trip to Israel that Nazism was a left-wing phenomenon rather than a movement of the extreme right. The education minister describes the dictatorship as “a democratic regime by force”.
Mr Bolsonaro’s commemoration could weaken support for democracy. The reason why becomes evident in a video distributed by his office to journalists on the coup’s anniversary. Just two minutes long, it begins in black and white. A man with silver hair and scholarly glasses explains to “young” viewers that the 1960s were a “time of fear and threats”. Communists were “killing their compatriots” and threatening to impose their leftist ideology on all Brazilians.
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