Concerns about an electoral intervention by the army stem from Brazil’s brutal 21-year military dictatorship that ended in 1985, which led the country to establish rules to separate the armed forces from politics.
Definition
“Whoever wins the elections will govern Brazil. There is no other alternative than to respect the will of the people,” said retired General Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, who was Bolsonaro’s minister for five months in 2019 but was fired after falling out with the president.
“I can’t imagine the Armed Forces behaving any other way,” he added in an interview.
Political analysts and a former defense minister said the military’s prestige has suffered as Bolsonaro has blurred the line between his government and the armed forces.
The weak economy and the mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic by the president, who is skeptical about vaccines, are driving up his rejection rates and the first opinion polls show that Lula could sweep the elections.
Vaccination orders against covid-19 have caused divisions between Bolsonaro and what he frequently calls “my Army”, personalizing a public institution.
The Army command requires troops to be vaccinated, and the head of health regulator Anvisa, retired Admiral Antonio Barra Torres, wrote an open letter to the president urging him to retract criticism of his staff for authorizing vaccination of children against the virus. coronavirus.
“Recent statements about vaccines show that Bolsonaro was unable to impregnate the Armed Forces with his far-right ideology,” said former Defense Minister Celso Amorim.
Amorim, who was also Lula’s foreign minister from 2003 to 2010 and is now advising his candidacy, said he is not worried about the possibility that the military will try to stop a third term for the former union leader.
As president, Lula resisted calls from the left to prosecute the leaders of the armed forces for the crimes of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
He also oversaw ambitious spending on fighter jets, submarines and tanks, Amorim noted. “Bolsonaro tried to co-opt the military, but he couldn’t,” he said.
“Glossy mistakes”
Retired General Otavio Rego Barros, Bolsonaro’s spokesman until he was fired without replacement in 2020, said in a column that the military has not been responsible for the government’s “gross errors.”
“The Armed Forces reaffirm themselves as a State institution, far removed from partisan politics,” he wrote.
On Monday, the commander of the Brazilian Air Force, Carlos de Almeida Baptista Junior, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that the military had no party and that they would “greet” whoever became their commander-in-chief in the next presidential election. .
Another retired official, Gen. Paulo Chagas, who campaigned for Bolsonaro in 2018, said many of his colleagues had become upset with the president as he seemed not to measure up to the anti-corruption campaign with which he ran.
Some generals thought they could keep Bolsonaro under their wing by joining his government, but the opposite has happened, according to Creomar de Souza of the political risk consultancy Dharma. “It made them bow down. Those who disagreed either left or were fired,” he maintained.
Reuters Agency
Source: Ambito
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