In October, Eduardo Bolsonaro made a shocking statement. The son of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right authoritarian president of Brazil, suggested in an interview that his country may need to return to the tactics employed by its former military dictatorship to help crush his father’s enemies on the left. He asserted without evidence that Cuba was behind recent protests in Latin America and Argentina’s election of a moderate Peronist was part of a conspiracy to bring about a new leftist “revolution” in Latin America.
“If the left radicalizes to this extent [in Brazil] we will need to respond, and that response could come via a new AI-5,” he said, referring to the notorious Institutional Act Number Five, a notorious 1968 edict issued by the military government that indefinitely outlawed freedom of expression and assembly and shuttered the National Congress. The act began an era of intense political repression and media censorship. Hundreds of dissidents were tortured, killed and disappeared during the dictatorship, which ended in 1985.
Elected officials in the country quickly denounced Bolsonaro’s comments as “repugnant” and a “serious attack on democracy.” American conservatives, on the other hand, invited Bolsonaro to take the stage at one of DC’s biggest political events of the year, this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). ..
One of the Brazilian president’s three sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro will join them to show off his brand of populism on three different panels, including one called “CPAC Exile: The Unshackled Voices of Socialist Regimes,” where he will be joined by other international CPAC representatives. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors the conference, tweeted in January that the 35-year-old former police officer would “share how our conservative movement inspires freedom-loving people across the globe & how the US & Brazil can work together to stop socialism.”
This is how blatantly fascist ideas become normalized. If Trump gets a second term, we know what the agenda will be.
I wish I could understand why this isn’t the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign. I get that we want progressive policies to be enacted. That’s great. But I’m afraid that if the Democrats don’t focus on the immediate threat of a Trump re-election all of that may be looked back on as fiddling while Rome burned.