Next Sunday, October 2, Brazil is holding general elections. As the fourth democracy in the world with over 156 million voters, the residents of the country will vote for Governor, Senator, and Federal and State Deputies. The citizens living abroad can only vote for the president.
Ireland is one of the fourteen countries with over eleven thousand Brazilians voters.
People Before Profit has watched of the Brazilian situation closely since 2016, when former President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a sexist and illegal process. Bolsonaro dedicated his vote to “the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the terror of Dilma Rousseff” This was a reference to a brutal figure of the former military regime who was convicted on torture and who was responsible for the disappearance of 60 activists..
A small piece of history is necessary to understand the context the background to next Sunday’s election.
In 2016, Brazil was a country with a rising petroleum power, and its production was comparable to key OPEC producers such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. After the impeachment, vic- president Michel Temer took office and started privatising part of Petrobras business, selling stocks to big oil companies in Europe and the USA.
In 2017, the investigation known as Carwash, cleared the company from alleged bribery schemes and there was an agreement to pay $2.95 billion to settle a shareholder lawsuit in the United States. The following years were all about the destruction of Brazil’s public sector.
The Bolsonaro government has privatised energy and water at the behest of international companies.
Worker’s rights in Brazil no longer exist. The minimum wage was never so low as in the late six years.
Women’s rights are also under attack every day in Brazil. One woman is assassinated every 24 hours, and one woman is raped every 10 minutes in the country. The murder Mariele Franco, a councillor for the POSL party, was never clarified. A killer was arrested, but the question remains: who killed Marielle Franco?
Dublin has a memorial for Franco at Iveagh Garden.
Despite the fact 54% of Brazilian population is black, the result of structural racism, kills black people, particularly the youngest generation. According to the Rio Watch NGO, the mortality rates of black people was higher than the white population during the Covid pandemic,.
The Bolsonaro government was negligent in dealing with Covid and so over 650,000 died from the disease. An investigation in the Senate has demonstrated that the health ministry tried to bribe when buying the vaccine.
We cannot forget the climate and the attack on nature or what the partnership between Bolsonaro/Trump did to the environment. Bolsonaro’s treatment of indigenous people in Brazil is heinous, but it is not just these people who will be affected by the destruction of the Amazon.
Bolsonaro’s elections in 2018 was a combination of Donal Trump’s scheme of fake news with massive usage of WhatsApp messages. Pentecostal churches and pastors also played an important role.
In 2022, 33 million people are starving daily, buying chicken bones to improve their meal. Many families are getting food from litter bins to feed their children. Bolsonoro’s cynical attitude is just to deny the situation.
People Before Profit calls on Brazilians in Ireland to vote to defeat Bolsonaro.