Your Obedient Servant

Trump-Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro-Trump, both are miserable celebrities of modern history. We are regretfully talking about them almost on daily basis as epicenter of misfortune —whatever disgrace you can think of— especially after the Brazilian head of state is the perfect example of the world´s most servile man of the United States. I am not overreacting. This is real!

No matter Trump ridicules his servant behind the scenes, or says publicly Brazilian individuals are banned from entering the US as they may aggravate the coronavirus situation in the northern nation. Bolsonaro agrees and actually applauds the campaign his son is carrying out right now in American soil encouraging Brazilian people in the US to vote for Trump, as they overwhelmingly did in 2016 (more than 80% of support).

As Trump turns to federal forces, white supremacists and agents specialized in the arrest and disappearance of opposition leaders, to face the growing and multiple anti-racial riots in dozens of American cities, Bolsonaro is paying close attention to this and has resorted to groups of hardline followers, who helped him win the elections, to face riots against him, demanding economic upturn and other consequences arisen from the pandemic.

Actually, both nations are closely united and compete to be regarded as the epicenter of the pandemic. Both the US and Brazil lead the world in infected people and death, being poor people the main targets of the disease.

We should “admire” Bolsonaro´s stoicism as he has tested positive two consecutive times from Covid-19. Nonetheless, he has not abandoned his opening and anti-isolation policy, which has resulted in more virus spreading, surpassing his master´s attitude, who dared to say “cases are up because we do more testing” (¿?), while showing disrespect and downplaying the efforts of US scientists calling for self-isolation, by accusing them of sabotaging the US economy.

THE MOST SERVILE

Perhaps the most servile sign of Bolsonaro´s policy is his attempt by all means to convince his friends in the Army to accept that the US may use any portion of the Brazilian soil to execute any military action on “behalf of democracy and therefore stage and start an invasion against Venezuela, after the most recent fiasco starred by American and Colombian mercenaries in the coast of Venezuela.

Submissive to the interests of national land predators who control agribusiness and multinationals with a majority of US capital, which have seized most of mineral resources from indigenous lands, everyone would guess Bolsonaro´s reaction if the Amazon basin were listed as World Heritage Site by UNESCO, agency the US withdrew as Trump saw “a biased stance against Israel,” months before moving the its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But the Paris Agreement, strictly speaking, is silent on the Amazonia.

It is more likely that this Brazil may spread the fake news inspired in the so-called Andinia Plan, a conspiracy theory that warned, back in the 1970s, about a Zionist plot to steal Patagonia to Chile and Argentina to create another Jew State…However, Brazilian landowners, with their bulldozers and chainsaws, are already on this. The same landowners who, afterwards, reforest the area by sowing soy where there was a forest full of Ceiba trees before, turning local wildlife into cattle.

TO SOME DEGREE

I do not know if, by now, the Brazilian president is still following the steps of his beloved Trump, but the fact of Brazil withdrawing from the Paris Agreement would certainly hurt the interests of several government-aligned entrepreneurs who may lose their necessary quality certifications to export their products.

And certifications are important. Unlike the US —where they are not approved by the White House— they do need a large parliamentary majority in Brazil. And this may occur only if Bolsonaro does not shut the Congress down before, as he promised back in time in a interview when he was member of Parliament when he was asked about his first steps as President if he resulted to be elected. “I would stage a coup the very same day,” he answered straightforwardly.

Rebelión recalls that when Bolsonaro said the environmental policy of Brazil was “suffocating the country,” he looked like a character of John Waters´ Desperate Living (1977), who amid a nervous breakdown, he yelled he hated nature because trees were stolen fresh air from him.

Meanwhile, in the shades of his Machiavellian plan to merge the Ministry of Environment with the Ministry of Agriculture, Bolsonaro decided he will not assign public funds to finance environmental groups to which the State paid some of the money gathered via penalties from predators of the Amazonia. Bolsonaro´s plan, in his own words, is to abolish the “industry of fines” that represents IBAMA (the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources).

To people like Bolsonaro and his master Trump, who embraces but despises him, the words of anthropologist Didier Fassin fit perfectly when he refers to fools and idiots who do not want to see facts and parrot all the time, or deniers, those who react against reality and truth systematically.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff