Forrest Hylton

I have written before about Víctor Peña, a displaced cacique of the Zenú people whose entire family has died since the Covid-19 pandemic began, some of them murdered by narco-paramilitaries. We did relief work together in Medellín – getting alcohol gel, masks and food to Zenú mothers – during the pandemic in 2020. If he ever returned to his home town, Tuchín, Victor would be killed too.

On 30 March, former president Jair Bolsonaro arrived in Brasília from Orlando to face justice. ‘I’m being humiliated,’ he said. No more than a few dozen supporters had turned up to greet him. After the failed coup attempt on 8 January, it seems there’s little appetite for direct action among Brazil’s fascists (for the time being). The day after Bolsonaro’s return was the anniversary of the military coup of 1964, which he celebrated annually during his presidency. This year, the army vowed to punish anyone who did so.

Among the visitors to Salvador was the US ambassador, Elizabeth Bagley, who was photographed leaning from a window to shake hands with Governor Jerônimo Rodrigues as the blocos passed below. Bagley tweeted that her first trip to the city ‘could not have been better’, thanks to the ‘contagious energy’ and the ‘music, colours and people’. Gilberto Gil performed with Margareth Menezes, the new culture minister. Other musicians included BaianaSystem and Ivette Sangalo.

Discussions of genocide often hinge on intent, but the extermination of a people can result as an unintended consequence of the violent pursuit of trade, private property, profit and state sovereignty: the fever for gold in Hispaniola after 1492, for example, or California after 1848. In Brazil as elsewhere in the Western hemisphere, conquest and genocide in pursuit of El Dorado continue.

To the extent that history repeats itself, it does so in spiral fashion, rather than exactly, and more often as tragedy than farce. Yesterday in Brasília, when a bolsonarista mob briefly invaded the Praça dos Três Poderes and vandalised Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidential Palace (already looted by Bolsonaro himself, who stole everything except the bathroom fixtures; vandals shat and pissed all over the place), elements of both were in evidence. By causing chaos and destruction, and alleging electoral fraud, the mob hoped to force the army to intervene – as it had been demanding, to no effect, in the ‘civilian’ encampments (full of retired, reserve and active military personnel) that sprang up in front of army barracks throughout Brazil after Lula’s victory on 30 October. Before the elections, the Pentagon, CIA and State Department all made clear that the US government has no appetite for a fascist coup in Brazil at the moment. To say the 8 January plot was far-fetched is an understatement.