Jun 14 2024 | Nº. 121

Editorial

Finance Minister Fernando Haddad is facing pressure once again to demonstrate that the government is willing and able to cut spending to help balance the budget after working in much of 2023 to raise new revenues. To that end, he announced this week that his office will propose changes in how the government calculates the allocation of resources in healthcare and education for next year’s budget. He argues that a change is necessary to signal the government’s commitment to fiscal responsibility and adds that, given that public spending in those areas is slated to increase at a faster rate than other government expenditures, there will be no room for non-discretionary spending by 2030. This led to a new round of recriminations and off-the-record sniping. On Thursday, June 13, Haddad and Minister of Planning and Budget Simone Tebet sought to quell market concerns by doubling down on a commitment to cut spending, signaling that tensions within the PT over the government’s economic approach are unlikely to die down anytime soon, as is speculation over whether Haddad will remain in his post. 

Lula was also pressed to decide the fate of his minister of communications, indicted for manipulating contracts and diverting government resources. From Switzerland, where Lula was attending a summit of the International Labor Organization, the president said his cabinet member should be afforded the right to defend himself. Some in the PT reportedly argued behind the scenes that the minister’s party was not delivering sufficient votes in Congress and should thus be removed to spare the administration further embarrassment while others worried about the political cost such a move might incur. 

Another political development that garnered considerable attention and outrage this week was the debate in Congress over a proposed law that would align punishment for abortion with penalties for homicide. Although abortion is already a heavily circumscribed procedure in Brazil, the proposed legislation would increase the severity of penalties for women, healthcare providers, and others assisting in the procedure. As many have pointed out, the new law would penalize more heavily a woman who sought an abortion after being raped than the man who raped her. This proposal has highlighted deep societal and political divides, with significant implications for Brazil's legal framework and reproductive rights. On Thursday, June 13, it was reported that the Lula government had reached a tentative deal with Arthur Lira, the head of the lower chamber of Congress, to delay any further motion on the abortion measure until after municipal elections this fall, deferring this extremely contentious debate.

Highlights

• Violence in Rio. The civil and military police of the state of Rio de Janeiro carried out a major operation against organized crime in the Favelas da Maré group, where 140 thousand people live. During the two days of intense shootings, 37 schools in the community were closed, leaving 13,688 public school students without classes. The 16th major police operation in Maré left five people dead, including a sergeant from the Bope (Special Operations Battalion) of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police. The soldier's death was the trigger for the operation.

   

• Attack against Bolsonaro. This week, the Federal Police reiterated the information that Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, the man who stabbed Jair Bolsonaro in the stomach during the 2018 election campaign, acted alone. Three surveys reached the same conclusion. They were opened after political pressure from Bolsonaro who, while he was President, did everything he could to say that the actor in the attack had connections with left-wing political parties and the criminal faction PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital). The Federal Police say that the lawyer who defended Adélio later had a connection with the PCC, but the facts related to this connection only occurred two years after the attack against Bolsonaro, and are not linked to Adélio's motivations for committing the 2018 crime. , which contradicts the false thesis repeated several times by Bolsonaro and his followers.

   

• Intelligence plot. On another front of investigation, the Federal Police are looking for those responsible for what earned the nickname “parallel Abin”, in reference to the use of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency to produce information against political opponents during the Bolsonaro government. According to Federal Police management, people involved in the plot would have shown interest in signing plea bargain agreements to talk about the misuse of tracking software that had been acquired by Abin to track Bolsonaro's enemies. The Brazilian Intelligence Agency became the target of Federal Police investigations in March 2023. The investigation is expected to be completed by July or August.

   

• Reconstruction. Just over a month after the worst tragedy in its history, the state of Rio Grande do Sul is trying to return to normal, as the water level in Lake Guaíba drops below the historical maximum of 5.33 meters, leaving the A trail of destruction surfaced, in addition to 175 deaths and more than 400,000 people left homeless. The rains affected 478 cities and 2.3 million people, which corresponds to 20% of the population of the state in the extreme south of Brazil. The governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Eduardo Leite, announced the plan to build 500 temporary homes for the homeless, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized the measure, saying that it is preferable to pay compensation and invest in the construction of permanent homes.

• Neoliberal pressure. Lula's Minister of Planning, Simone Tebet, this week defended the adoption of a series of economic measures with a neoliberal profile. The proposals she made had a bad impact among members and supporters of the government, highlighting the contradictions of a left-wing government that only exists because it received electoral support from a broad and heterogeneous base that includes names from the center and right such as Tebet. According to her, there are studies to cut public spending on unemployment insurance and the so-called BCP (Continuous Payment Benefit), which includes programs with a social assistance profile, such as the payment of minimum wage to the elderly and people with disabilities. Tebet said she is opposed, however, to changes in retirement rules, as she fears the negative effect the measure would have by pushing retirees into other social programs that are costly to the government.

• Strikes at universities. Professors from federal universities in Brazil completed two months of strike this week and until this Thursday, June 13th, maintained the strike in at least 55 universities in the sector, despite the government having announced the allocation of R$ 5.5 billion (US$1 billion) for educational institutions and federal hospitals, as part of the so-called PAC (Growth Acceleration Program) for Universities. The end of the strikes still depends, however, on deliberations made by local assemblies and the category's unions. President Lula expressed his displeasure with the long duration of the movement, saying that every strike “has a time to start and a time to end” and cannot reach an “all or nothing” situation.

NEWS FROM WBO, ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

Targeted pursuit. Far-right parliamentarians linked to Bolsonaro made a request this week for the Public Security and Combating Organized Crime Commission of the Chamber of Deputies to call members of NetLab – a laboratory at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) to testify at a public hearing. which, since 2013, has been dedicated to researching digital disinformation in Brazil. The deputies question the transfer of public funds to NetLab, whose research serves, according to them, as a subsidy for the Justice to take action against far-right militants engaged in the dissemination of fake news. The university's rector, Roberto Medronho, says that the request is a form of “censorship of research”, which “recalls the darkest times in the country's history”.

New affiliates. The WBO announced four new affiliations in recent days. In addition to the announcements made in last week's bulletin, about the arrival of the Third Sector Observatory and the Democracy Institute in Xeque, there was also the joining of the organization Direito à Memória e a Justiça racial and Made – Center for Research in Macroeconomics and Inequalities. This brings the number of organizations affiliated to the WBO to 68.

Precautionary measures. The WBO followed on June 6th, at the Itamaraty Palace, in Brasília, the meeting of the Joint Working Table on the implementation of precautionary measures dictated by the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) to Brazil after the murder of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips, and threats against 11 members of Univaja (Union of Indigenous Peoples of Vale do Javari), which operates where the crime occurred, in June 2022. These precautionary measures were a response to the demand brought to the IACHR by the WBO and six partner organizations : Article 19 Brazil and Latin America, Regional Alliance for Free Expression and Information, Vladimir Herzog Institute, Abraji (Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism), Reporters Without Borders and Torna Voz.

Confronting extremism. The Igarapé Institute launched a report called “Resistance to Authoritarianism: Lessons Learned from Brazilian Civil Society”, in which it talks about civil society action in the face of authoritarian threats from the now former president Jair Bolsonaro, between 2019 and 2022. On Wednesday, On July 12, Lasa (Latin American Studies Association) promoted the debate “Populism, Extremism and Transnational Influence – Comparative Perspectives of Brazil and Latin America”, with the participation of two researchers associated with the WBO, Guilherme Casarões and David Nemer. The role of civil society in containing far-right political extremism was also the subject of an article published by Casarões in Third World Quarterly.

Feature Article

Lies about Freedom of Expression

By Eugênio Bucci*

The floods in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, which lasted between April and May 2024 leaving 170 dead and more than 735 thousand homeless (as of June 10, 2024), provided the pretext for a new avalanche of fake news. In short videos that circulated massively on social (or, more precisely, antisocial) networks, a profusion of lies took over all these spaces. Some claimed that it was useless to make donations to the victims because the federal government was blocking trucks heading to Rio Grande do Sul. Others maintained that the army and firefighters were denying help to the homeless. Like these two examples, there were – and still are – many other fake versions of news circulating in Brazil. They hampered assistance to the affected populations, sowed confusion, increased chaos, spread panic, and discredited the authorities and volunteers who supported rescue and aid operations. All this material – spread by anti-democratic far-right activists – worsened the disaster, which sociologist Sérgio Abranches called a “socioclimatic tragedy”. 

Why have things reached this point in our societies? How did disinformation gain so much momentum, and why does it corrode democracy from within? Many explanations have appeared and deserve attention. In this brief article I will try to explain two reasons for what is happening. In part, I will use arguments that I recently presented in an article for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo (“Fake Liberty and the Marquês de Sade,” May 16, 2024, p. A5). 

It is necessary to consider that the large-scale production of these falsehoods constitutes a super-industrial activity, which mobilizes expensive and complex resources with one essential characteristic: it works in the shadows. The centers that generate fraudulent content are hidden; they do not work in daylight. They are invisible. Those who do appear are a few politicians from the anti-democratic far right and the crowds of supporters who work for free to spread disinformation. 

Amid this spectacle of horror and contempt for the human beings, one speech in particular caught attention. Defenders of organizations that distributed fake news claimed that the liars were simply exercising their “freedom of expression.” With this justification, they produced yet another untruth – and one of the most serious.

Firstly, it is untrue because the clandestine agencies that industrially manufacture disinformation do not have the right to freedom of expression. It's not difficult to demonstrate why. Freedom of expression is a right of human being, not of legal entities or criminal organizations. The State, companies, and political parties do not have freedom of expression, as they are not human beings. Therefore, as I have been saying, freedom of expression is a human right of people of flesh and blood and not an economic or corporate license. 

In short, when big tech promotes falsehoods that harm the public health and physical integrity of real people, it is not freedom of expression we are talking about, but the abuse of economic power. The purpose of this abuse is to manipulate the masses for hidden electoral purposes. 

What about the citizens – the unfortunate people who allow themselves to be manipulated – who work for free to spread fake information? These people do have the right to freedom of expression, but they get everything wrong. They conceive of freedom as if it were not a civilized right, but a kind of open gate to give vent to visceral, animalistic, and brutal impulses. For them, freedom would be the triumph of the animal over the human. With this type of idea in their heads (in fact, a non-idea), they use their own freedom to destroy the freedom of everyone else.

In a book released a few weeks ago in Brazil (O mala-estar na cultura revisitado, organized by Lucia Santaella and published by Estação das Letras e Cores), psychoanalyst Ricardo Goldenberg makes a great contribution to understanding this savage mentality. In his essay, “From Cynicism to Shamelessness,” Goldenberg locates in the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) the fantasy that “individual freedom” would include a supposed “right” to “enjoy others without any hindrance” (“enjoy,” here, is synonymous with abuse). 

In Sade, I add, the “free” subject combines the worst vice of the aristocracy (disposing of the body of others as he disposes of the land) with the worst vice of the bourgeoisie (exploiting the energy of others to accumulate money and pleasure). He is an amoral subject, murderer, torturer, pedophile, rapist, and dictator. What he professes is not the freedom that underpins democracy, but fake freedom, sadistic freedom, which in essence is the denial of all freedom.

This illness of social mentality, this madness of the masses, is part of the tragedy that befell Rio Grande do Sul and is one of the reasons for the institutional collapse that is manifesting itself in so many democracies around the world.

*journalist and full professor at the School of Communication and Art at the University of São Paulo.

Eugênio Bucci, journalist and full professor at the School of Communication and Art at the University of São Paulo.

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.