The New York Times
Mar. 6, 2023
by Vanessa Barbara
Contributing Opinion Writer
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SÃO PAULO, Brazil — It reads like science fiction. In 93 pages, the text sketches out a strange future. In 2027, there’s a new pandemic, caused by the “Xvirus.” A year later, war breaks out between the United States and both China and Russia over bauxite deposits in Guyana. By the year 2035, Brazilians openly admit their innate conservatism and embrace a future where the word “Indigenous” barely exists.
Yet these predictions are not from some work of fiction. Instead, they come from a strange policy document published last year by a group of institutes run by retired Brazilian military personnel. Titled “Nation Project: Brazil in 2035,” the report proposes a grand national strategy on issues like geopolitics, science, technology, education and health. Alongside its more outlandish predictions, it foresees the end of Brazil’s universal health care system and public universities, and calls for the scrapping of environmental protections.
It’s tempting to laugh, but this was no fringe affair. The presentation of the plan last year was attended by Brazil’s vice president and the secretary general of the Defense Ministry. After all, this is Brazil, where the military has long meddled with the government — and ruled over the country in a dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
In the decades since, the military returned to the barracks, but its withdrawal was always conditional. The tenure of Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, brought the military back to the heart of government. He might have grudgingly left office, but Brazil’s military — privileged, preponderant and unaccountable — remains a constant threat to the country’s democracy.
At the root of the military’s power is amnesia. During the dictatorship, the regime killed hundreds and tortured 20,000 people. Yet in 1979, it passed an amnesty law for those who had committed politically motivated crimes in the previous two decades, covering not only exiled activists but also military and public officials accused of murder, torture and sexual abuse. The law was upheld in 2010 by the Supreme Court. Four years later, a National Truth Commission identified 377 public officials responsible for human rights abuses during the dictatorship, but little was done. No military officers have ever been punished for their crimes.
That’s why Brazilians cannot watch the movie “Argentina, 1985” without crying out in shame. Winner of the Golden Globe for best non-English-language film and nominated for a 2023 Academy Award, it depicts the effort to haul into court members of the military juntas that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The trial, which occurred in 1985, helped shape the public debate about what happened in those brutal years — and sent a few generals to prison. So far, more than a thousand people have been convicted of crimes against humanity in our neighboring country.
Nothing of the sort ever occurred in Brazil. Here, in 2023, there are still many people who praise the country’s military past. As one Bolsonaro-supporting woman told me recently, the regime “hadn’t butchered ordinary people.” I wouldn’t dare to say that to the family of Maurina Borges da Silveira, a Catholic nun who was tortured in 1969, or to Gino Ghilardini, an 8-year-old who was tortured in 1973, or to the family of Esmeraldina Carvalho Cunha, a homemaker who was killed in 1972 after she accurately blamed the military for the death of her daughter.
In Brazil, supporters of the dictatorship hint at the crimes of “the other side” — the leftist guerrilla groups that opposed the regime — as if their acts were in the same league as the atrocities committed by forces of the state. But it’s impossible to defend the officials who tortured pregnant women and arrested young children, calling them terrorists and threats to national security.
The Brazilian military never apologized for its crimes. On the contrary, it still celebrates what it calls the 1964 revolution. During the government of Mr. Bolsonaro, it celebrated March 31 — the date of the coup that brought the military to power — every year. The regime change, according to a former defense minister, was a “historical landmark of Brazilian political evolution.”
But the problem goes much farther back, to the very founding of the country. The republic, after all, was established by a military coup in 1889. “Military officers,” as the eminent Brazilian lawyer Heráclito Sobral Pinto once said, “never accepted not being the owners of the republic.” In the 130 years since, the military has hovered over Brazil — as the political scientist Adam Przeworski wrote, referring to democracies afflicted by overweening militaries — “like menacing shadows, ready to fall upon anyone who goes too far in undermining their values and their interests.”
And those interests are considerable. With no war in sight, Brazil has the 15th-largest standing army in the world, with 351,000 active personnel, 167,000 inactive officers and 233,400 pensioners, according to the Transparency Portal. In terms of payroll, the federal government spends more on defense than it does on education — and almost five times more than it spends on health. (By the way, the country has a huge public health care system.) The expected budget of the Defense Ministry for this year is $23 billion, 77 percent of which is earmarked to pay personnel.
Military officials enjoy many privileges, with their own systems of education, housing, health care and even criminal justice. They were, tellingly, exempt from Brazil’s recent pension reform. Lucky for them: In 2019, the average remuneration for a retired member of the military was more than six times that of a retired civilian.
It’s not just military officials who benefit from such largess, but their families too. For instance, 137,900 unmarried daughters of military members will receive their father’s pensions for the rest of their lives — a list that includes the two daughters of Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who was accused of torturing hundreds of people and retired with the rank of marshal.
After Mr. Bolsonaro became president in 2019, the military flooded into the civilian administration. In 2020, 6,157 military officers — half of them on active duty — worked for the federal government, more than twice the number in 2018. At one point, 11 of the 26 ministers in Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration were current or former officers, including the health minister during most of the pandemic, Gen. Eduardo Pazuello, who has yet to be held accountable for his misdeeds.
The new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has been trying to slowly remove military personnel from the government — especially after the insurrection of Jan. 8, in which the military played a murky role. If the military did not participate in the riots, it certainly didn’t do much to prevent them. In January, Mr. Lula fired the head of the army, who allegedly protected pro-Bolsonaro rioters at an encampment in Brasília on the night of the attacks. Encouragingly, a Supreme Court justice has ruled that military officers involved in the riots will be tried by a civilian court.
It’s a start, but there’s much further to go before we’re free from the shadow of the military. Then, at last, we can relegate its plans to the realms of fantasy, where they belong.
A version of this article appears in print on March 9, 2023, Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Bolsonaro May Be Gone, but Brazil Is Still Under Threat.
