Jair Bolsonaro’s Presidential Re-election Would Be a Victory for Democracy in Brazil

President of Brazil and Presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro speaks to supporters during a rally ahead of Sunday elections in Santos, Brazil, on Sept. 28, 2022. Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images

Commentary

Brazil’s next presidential elections are scheduled to be held on Oct. 2—this Sunday. Many sectors of the media have accused the current incumbent, presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, of posing a threat to Brazil’s democracy. Indeed, he is widely depicted by the western media as a being “fascist” or worse intent on tyranny.

By contrast, media reports, especially overseas media, blandly describe the opposition candidate, former President Lula da Silva, merely as “leftist” or “liberal.”

So, what is wrong with this sort of narrative?

Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, more commonly known simply as “Lula,” is the leftist candidate in this presidential election. He was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2011. During this period, he was the leader of a notoriously corrupt government that employed thousands of members of his own party, the Workers’ Party, in the state’s machinery.

One of those party members, Marco Aurélio Garcia, was employed by then President Lula to be his foreign affairs advisor. Garcia openly expressed a desire to establish communism in Brazil.

In an article written to celebrate the anniversary of Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto,” Garcia, concluded: “The agenda is clear. If the horizon that we search for is still called communism, it is time to re-constitute it.”

As a way of “re-constituting” communism, Lula and his colleagues in the Workers’ Party in 1990 created an organization called the Forum de São Paulo (FSP) to fight the “negative effects” visited on communism by the dismantling of the Soviet Empire. In 2004, its organizers declared that the major goal of the FSP was “offsetting our losses in Eastern Europe with our victories in Latin America.”

Brazil's former president and current presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva speaks to supporters during a campaign rally in the final week of campaigning at Portela Samba School in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Sept. 25, 2022. Buda Mendes/Getty Images

Lula’s Strong Ties With Communist Movements

Lula was the FSP’s first chairman during its meetings which were attended by delegates of Colombia’s FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, Peru’s TUPAC-AMARU guerrillas, Chile’s MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) guerrillas, Spain’s Basque separatist ETA, and the Irish Republic Army (IRA). The U.S. State Department considers all of these to be terrorist organizations.

The late Dr. Constantine Menges, a former CIA intelligence officer, commented:

“[Lula da Silva] has been a sponsor of international terrorism because these annual [FSP] meetings are used by the anti-U.S. terrorist and radical organizations to coordinate their plans for taking power in their respective countries and for planning actions against the United States.”

During Lula’s presidency, his government was even accused of receiving illegal money from the communist regime of Cuba.

As reported by Veja magazine on Nov. 2, 2005, a Cuban citizen by the name of Sergio Certantes, a diplomat based in the capital city of Brasília, apparently sent three million dollars by plane to Brazil in two boxes containing Johnnie Walker whiskey and one box containing Cuban rum.

The story at first seems a bit surreal, but at a closer look, it is rich in detail and has been backed by other sources of information. What is more, the mastermind of the political generation that came to power during Lula’s presidency, José Dirceu, was a left-wing terrorist who worked and studied in Cuba until 1975. He was the architect of Lula’s election as president and often travelled to Cuba at Fidel Castro’s personal expense and invitation.

A traditional ally of the Workers’ Party, and current supporter of Lula’s presidential candidature, is the Communist Party of Brazil. This party was created in 1958 as a result of a splinter inside the Brazilian Communist Party following Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciations of genocidal atrocities by Joseph Stalin.

In an open letter to that Soviet leader, members of this party protested against his “revisionist” agenda and then decided to align themselves with Maoism and, in particular, the Chinese Communist Party.

According to Lucas Ribeiro, a Brazilian journalist, the notion that Lula is a “moderate” is completely absurd and devoid of any practical evidence. As he points out, Lula’s party makes no secret of its communist identity, and its events proudly display the “International Socialist” and the red flag with a communist symbol stamped on it—the red star as the party’s official symbol.

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wears a face mask during a press conference in Brasilia, Brazil, on Oct. 8, 2021. Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Images

This goes without saying that Lula openly supports socialist dictatorships not only in Latin America but also across the globe.

“This completely dispels any assumption that Lula is really a moderate,” Ribeiro says.

In fact, according to Frei Betto, one of Lula’s closest friends, his failure in the presidency was not being radical enough. If in power again, he must not ignore “revolutionary horizons” and never allow himself “to compete in equality of conditions with the right.”

Brazilians simply cannot develop a normal democracy in a political environment such as this.

Bolsonaro Is a Champion for Democracy, Not a Threat

But Brazilians do have the chance to re-elect their current president, Bolsonaro, who has spent a lot of his time in office trying to eliminate deep-rooted corruption.

In fact, his stance on corruption has earned Bolsonoro enormous popular support. On Sept. 7, the day of the nation’s 200th anniversary of Independence, millions of Brazilians went on the streets to demonstrate their support for Bolsonaro and his conservative government.

Of course, there are other reasons why Brazilians do and should support their president. Bolsonaro reduced the size of an inefficient and corrupt state and dramatically reduced the tax burden in Brazil.

His electoral motto, “Brazil Above Everything, God Above Everyone,” works as a combination of patriotism and a recognition of God as the ultimate ruler and provider for the nation.

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• Why Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Deserves to Be Re-elected: Part 2

As one may expect, this belief in God is what especially angers the secular elites and motivates them to further attack the Brazilian president. The media, both national and international, quite often portrays his impending re-election as a major threat to democracy in Brazil when such a threat actually comes from their own favoured leftist candidate.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.