Emboldened by Trump, Brazil’s Bolsonaro orders military to celebrate 1964 coup
By
Miguel Andrade
29 March 2019
On Monday, presidential spokesman Gen. Otávio Barros announced to the press the unprecedented decision taken by Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro to order military institutions to prepare “due celebrations” of the anniversary of the 1964 US-backed military coup that brought down the bourgeois-nationalist government of President João Goulart.
The coup inaugurated a blood-soaked regime that would last until 1985 and that would prove instrumental in the installation of three other genocidal military regimes in the following years, in Chile and Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976, that murdered, tortured and persecuted millions of South Americans.
Bolsonaro has insisted that the military regime was not a dictatorship and that its seizure of power in 1964 was not a coup. He has defended torture and insisted that the solution to Brazil’s problems is to “do the job that the military regime didn’t do: killing 30,000.”
Bolsonaro’s order is yet another milestone in the protracted and sharp turn to the right taken by the Brazilian political regime since the re-election of Workers Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff in 2014. Although such celebrations have been held furtively in the country’s military institutions, especially military schools and academies and retired officers’ clubs, it is the first time an elected president orders such ceremonies and publicly defends the former dictatorship.
The return of such open celebrations again exposes the lies of all those in the former opposition to the dictatorship, first and foremost in the PT, that a stable bourgeois democracy could be built in Brazil if only there was respect for their…