Bruna Frascolla
If the Anti-Terrorism Law had been created in a government opposing Lula's Party, it could have been better.
Brazilian anti-terrorism law is a joke. In the second article, it states: "Terrorism consists of the practice by one or more individuals of the acts provided for in this article, for reasons of xenophobia, discrimination or prejudice based on race, color, ethnicity and religion, when committed with the purpose of provoking social or generalized terror, exposing people, property, public peace or public safety to danger." (Emphasis added.) It follows that if a group "threatens to use [...] explosives [...]", "violently seizes [...] schools, sports stadiums, public facilities or places where essential public services operate" and "attacks [someone's] life", but does so in the name of love and world peace, then it is not terrorism. Terrorism, only if the group does it all in the name of xenophobia, etc. (This "etc." may include even transphobia, since the Supreme Court found that transphobia is the same as racism.) Therefore, few people will disagree that it is an moronic law.
How did Brazil pass such a law? The name of the president, at the end of the law signed in 2016, already helps to answer: Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla or, in the correct military jargon, a former terrorist.
During the Cold War, South America saw the CIA support military coups and, decades later, Jimmy Carter presented the USA as champions of Human Rights (nowadays ironically called Dudes' Rights by Brazilians, changing humanos for manos), thus urging campaigns for political openness and the end of dictators. Brazil was one of these countries, and here we can observe that the same sectors of the media that encouraged the 1964 coup to "save democracy" also campaigned for the "end of dictatorship" and "democratic opening". The media then promoted the "beautiful people", a young artistic class full of "social conscience" who would overthrow the dictatorship and change the country. It was the so called festive left.
However, in addition to this left, the so-called armed left was present in the Americas. There was a varied ideological menu at their disposal that converged on the use of terrorism as a means to overthrow non-communist regimes. In the case of Brazil, the first terrorist attack was perpetrated by a Catholic group: in 1968, Ação Popular (AP) placed a bomb in an airport with the intention of killing future president Costa e Silva. The Guararapes Airport Attack failed in its attempt, but caused lethal victims. As for the general overview, it is worth highlighting that the main trend was probably Foquism, inspired by Che Guevara and put on paper by the Frenchman Régis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution (1967); that Maoism inspired, in the 1960s, a guerrilla movement in the Amazon jungle (Guerrilha do Araguaia); and that in the same period Carlos Marighella had written in 1969 a Minimanual for the urban guerrilla, translated into several languages. In this, Marighella makes a literal apology for terrorism: "Today, to be 'violent' or a 'terrorist' is a quality that ennobles any honorable person, because it is an act worthy of a revolutionary engaged in armed struggle against the shameful military dictatorship and its atrocities."
To this day, the Brazilian left wants to paint the "fight against dictatorship" as something comparable to anti-colonial struggles. The problem is that the military regime, developmentalist and without automatic alignment with the USA, enjoyed great popularity, especially in the 1970s. The economy was taking off and there were no serious public security problems (the precedent most similar to that of the current cartels and militias was that of Cangaço, which was in force in the Old Republic and met its end in the Estado Novo, when the government killed the bandits and exposed their heads at the Institute of Legal Medicine). The armed insurgency against the military regime was, most of the time, a movement of young middle-class university students who were willing to blow up people to put an end to a regime that most people liked - while posing as their real representatives.
Dilma Rousseff was a young woman with this profile, and was part of the COLINA and VAR-Palmares organizations. This kind of group robbed banks, "expropriated" businesses, planted bombs and organized kidnappings of authorities. It was no wonder, therefore, that the military regime sought to disrupt them and, with the help of the CIA, used torture methods for this purpose. During this period, something very important also happened: guerrillas were placed in the same prison as gang members. From the combination of middle-class communists and slum drug sellers, the Red Phalanx, or Red Command, the main faction in Rio de Janeiro, emerged in 1979.
While overthrowing regimes and teaching torture, Jimmy Carter's USA (1977 - 1981) promoted Human Rights. In Brazil, the binomial of denouncing torture and defending democracy has become a craze for "beautiful people" and the festive left. It does not matter that the military regime (unlike the Estado Novo) was not a dictatorship, but rather a hyper-regulated formal democracy, with separation of powers, exchange of presidents and direct elections for various positions - and that this formal democratic character was important precisely to deliver the coup that would save democracy from the "communist" elected by the people. What mattered was establishing in the Brazilian lexicon the Manichaean dichotomy between dictatorship and democracy. If a regime is good, it is democratic; if a regime is bad, it is dictatorial. Tertium non datur.
In this liberal scheme, it is clear that all Marxist guerrillas who intended to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat should be considered bad, but that was not what happened. The media and academia promoted a true process of canonization of all those who "fought against the dictatorship", and this included communists. Furthermore, some important guerrillas, such as Fernando Gabeira, converted to the festive left. Soviet communism was in its throes, it was time for Brazilian communists to transform into New York liberals concerned with ecology, drugs and... Human Rights. As for the few real communists who remained, all they had to do was adopt the pro-Soviet rhetorical trick of saying that liberal democracy is not true democracy. The name "dictatorship of the proletariat" is left aside and one talks about "popular democracy", as in the official name of North Korea.
Thus, the New Republic formally begins in 1985 with the inauguration of the first elected civilian president. In practice, however, it begins in 1988, the year of the promulgation of the new Constitution, which was written in this atmosphere, and by a horde of law graduates who yearned to promote human rights. One of the results already discussed is the virtual omnipotence of the Public Attorney's Office and the Supreme Court. And its precursor, which made the creation of the New Republic possible, was the Amnesty Law of 1979, which was created under pressure from Human Rights, and which freed both left-wing terrorists and right-wing torturers.
If the Anti-Terrorism Law had been created in a government opposing the PT (Lula's Party), it could have been better. If it were done during a Lula government, perhaps it would be tailor-made to protect the MST and MTST. A Dilma government was the worst possible scenario, as the president decided to politicize the military regime as much as possible, and during this period there was a lot of pressure for a review of the Amnesty Law, in order to punish torturers.
Should one think that there was a conspiracy to create the law during the Dilma government? I wish it were so! The pressure to create an anti-terrorism law arose because Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Hosting events of this magnitude required an anti-terrorism law. In the run-up to the World Cup, left-wing groups announced that there would be no World Cup, and some of them - the black blocs - even blew up things in the street, killing a journalist. Dilma Rousseff would be the most interested in having an anti-terrorism law, but she created one that protected these criminals. For her, personally, political terrorism is legitimate, and the law reflects that by punishing non noble causes.
Thanks to its hallucinated and immoral romanticization of the "fight against dictatorship", the Brazilian left is extremely irrational on matters of the greatest importance.