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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Sat Jun 6, 2020, 02:37 AM Jun 2020

Brazil's President Bolsonaro calls demonstrators "terrorists," threatens military repression

Brazil’s President Bolsonaro calls demonstrators “terrorists,” threatens military repression
By Miguel Andrade
6 June 2020

In a fascist rant delivered during the opening of a field hospital to treat COVID-19 patients, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro once again denounced demonstrators joining marches in five Brazilian cities held in solidarity with the protests in United States as “terrorists” and “outcasts” aiming to “break the country.”

He called for governors to deploy the National Guard against demonstrators taking part in new anti-government marches scheduled for Sunday, a day chosen as an answer to the weekly fascist demonstrations held by Bolsonaro supporters on Sundays. These rallies feature Bolsonaro himself and regularly call for a military coup and hail the brutal history of torture and executions of the 1964–1985 military dictatorship.

Bolsonaro’s latest threats came on the heels of a frenzied and terrified reaction by the president and his cabinet to the demonstrations last Sunday by youth joining the global wave of protests against the murder of George Floyd and social inequality, police brutality and racism, as well as the promotion of the latter by the Bolsonaro government. The demonstrations were met with brutal repression unleashed by state-controlled military police soldiers, which in turn protected fascist provocateurs bearing flags of the Ukranian neo-Nazi Right Sector. Protests have grown as Bolsonaro supporters respond to the US marches by holding Ku-Klux-Klan-like nightly marches with torches at the Supreme Court and Congress in an appeal to the most backward and disoriented members of Brazilian society.

Most significantly, however, Bolsonaro’s rant came just three days after an opinion piece published by vice president Gen. Hamilton Mourão published by Brazil’s oldest daily, Estado de S. Paulo, calling for demonstrators’ forceful seizure and arrest. In the article, Mourão fully endorsed the denunciations of Bolsonaro, aping Donald Trump’s rants against “antifa” that the demonstrators were “terrorists” that should be proscribed.

More:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/06/bras-j06.html

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