The Unburied
Everything returns to him. It had been less than one hour of Lula’s impressive victory, the first time a poor people elected a poor born man to its highest office. He spoke to crowds with tears in his eyes: “Let nobody doubt the strength of the Brazilian working class”. The crowds cheered. Their man had won.
Lula then moved to get his spoils. Globo, the country’s biggest TV network, a landmark both in its reach and in its representative power as a conservative institution, rushed to congratulate him. Fluff piece after fluff piece followed, culminating in one special appearance: Lula’s former prison warder during the dictatorship regime, a gentle old man, who explained he was but a host during Lula’s stay in prison. As though a regime that tortured and murdered hundreds of Brazilians, that repressed many more, that banned democracy for twenty years, could be reduced to a check in on an inconvenient hotel. The man, somewhat emotional, said they had granted Lula permission to see his dying mother. A kindness, a grand gesture. The lie of a dictatorship with human face validated in the night when left won for the first time in decades.
The newly elected president followed along the script. He smiled kindly, magnanimous. No hard feelings. He told the cameraman, almost smiling, that another one of his warders had joined the Worker’s Party and campaigned for him. Here was Lula at his best, our generous peacemaker, our man for all seasons. A figure that his fans and former enemies could learn to love.
Of course, Lula’s peace between the strong and the weak did favor one side; it was so with his overpriced works to keep the big companies on side, and it was so in his peace with what was done during the dictatorship. The Worker’s Party ranks had all sorts of revolutionary and exiled intellectuals, all of which had long lists of reasons to want to end all of dictatorship’s legacies. That wouldn’t come; not with Lula, who never felt comfortable touching that wasp’s nest, nor with Dilma Rousseff, his successor, who had been tortured in the dictatorship’s basement. Rousseff tried to establish a Truth Commission to get some justice; in a limited way she did. The problem was what she didn’t do, and what she and others allowed to grow.
The mentality that created the circumstances of the military coup have never been addressed in Brazil. There is still a very conservative middle class that hates its poorest, a corrupt Congress and Senate who undermine faith in democracy, a media so right wing that is not above manipulating facts to get its way, an unhealthy dependence to organized religion with too much political power, and above all, a police that continues to kill and torture Brazilians by the thousands every year. Except now they are not so much leftist leaning students, but ordinary black and brown citizens.
This was not addressed by Lula or by Dilma or even by once prince in exile sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Instead, all of them supported this system and even at some point made laws harsher; in 2014, Dilma set a National Force on the streets to protect tourists during the World Cup, and to repress possible protests. Brazil is a country of the unburied. It had a criminal government for twenty years, and it decided that those crimes were not a big deal. It decided, furthermore, that what that government left behind did not need to change. Here is Brazil’s judgment on twenty years of its right to vote stolen: Not that bad, really.
But the problem with the unburied is that they start to reek. In the recent years, with an economic and political crisis that grows and leaves millions in desperation, things start to stir and come back, now in the form of homophobic and uber-macho right wing populist presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, a man who takes pride in hating human rights and who praised torturers loudly, a man who sees the dictatorship as a source of pride, because things knew their place then; him, a white, middle class man, at the top. Everyone else, under his boot.
Bolsonaro is a ghost, an apparition created by our incapacity to honor the proper rites. He might say whatever he wants to say, but his voice is that of the dead. “You did not bury me well” They croak, from their shallow graves. “And so I shall bring you torment and pain.” As it is, his strength is limited; his ghoul-like figure scares us, but for now cannot touch us. We can banish him to irrelevance for a limited time. If he is to be defeated permanently, though, we must find the thing that allowed him to exist and burn it to the bone. It would hurt. Death always does.
