Brazil: the usual and not so usual culprits
By Olavo de Carvalho
20.05.06 | Even before the two hundred bullet-pierced corpses had time to stiffen, a whole crowd of illuminated “experts” showed up in all major newspapers and TV channels of three continents to spread to a gullible audience this holy and inviolable truth: the insurrectional killings in São Paulo and Santos were caused by poverty. Yes, extreme poverty bought thousands of Uzis and AK-47s and tons of ammunition, bribed hundreds of police officers and politicians, paid for the services of terrorist trainers from Spain, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.
The very leader of the rebellion, Marcos “Marcola” Camacho, admitted that the operation was prepared in close association to the MST, the “landless” movement, a pitiably destitute entity that has among its indigent friends and partners the British and Dutch Crowns, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Soros Foundation, besides the Brazilian governing party, the federal government itself and, not surprisingly, the Colombian narcoguerrillas, the Farc, a bunch of wretches that squander their scarce resources selling 200 tons of cocaine annually in the Brazilian drug market.
Mr. Marcola himself is a poor little fellow whose current protegée and lover, Cinthia, following the example of her many predecessors, spends the monthly trifle of US$ 8,000.00 to US$ 10,000.00 in the fashion garment stores in São Paulo. So deprived of financial resources is the poor guy that for his defense in a recent kidnapping trial he could not pay any other lawyer but Marcio Thomaz Bastos, a pop-star of Brazilian courts that now happens to be the government’s Minister of Justice, and as such specially well positioned to arbitrate impartially between the interests of his client and those of the Brazilian population. As soon as he was inaugurated in his new federal capacity, Mr. Bastos, a benefactor of mankind, managed to change Brazilian law, erasing kidnappings from the list of “heinous crimes” and thus reducing the penalty imposed to several important Brazilian citizens, among them, who would guess it?, Mr. Marcola.
The “experts” themselves are a pack of ragged beggars, in such a condition of deprivation that I have a hard time holding back my tears. One of them, Mr. Rubem César Fernandes, was the chief of the federal gun-grabbing campaign intended to disarm, in his own words, not the criminals but honest citizens. These ones, according to Mr. Fernandes’ reasoning, were the real security risk for the country, inasmuch as every criminal is an honest citizen before committing his first crime. As Mr. Fernandes is a poor destitute fellow, the NGO he runs in Rio de Janeiro has been yielding with stoic resignation to the humiliating fate of receiving full financial support from the federal government, the Ford Foundation, Bank Boston and Organizações Globo, the all-powerful Brazilian TV network. Another “expert”, the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant, for having demonstrated scientifically that criminality results from the war of the rich against the poor, was condemned by the wicked rich to shine as an academic idol in Berkeley and to receive a money prize from the MacArthur Foundation.
So vitally important is the function of poverty in the production of criminality in Brazil, that the Brazilian president himself, Mr. Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, seeing the murderous chaos spreading in the state of São Paulo, philosophically pondered that such things would never come to happen if during the 80’s and 90’s, instead of abandoning the poor children to the streets, we had invested in their education. The fact that these two decades were precisely those ones during which Mr. Lula’s predecessors in the government managed to put into schools 98 per cent of Brazilian children has absolutely no bearing upon his opinion. Don’t let yourself be duped by the guy’s Armani suits: he is really a poor fellow who ignores everything that went on in the federal government not only before his arrival to power but even after it, if we listen to his innocence claims over the rampant corruption among his closest aides and in his political party. Perhaps he can be better understood if seen as a living evidence that poverty can indeed lead to crime.
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But poverty, I admit, was not the only culprit to be unanimously indicted by the chic media as guilty for last week’s bloodshed in Brazil. The other was the governor of São Paulo, Mr. Claudio Lembo, an ideologically flavorless politician that, for pure lack of imagination, made his career in the pro-capitalist party, the PFL (Party of the Liberal Front), which now supports the opposition presidential candidate Geraldo Alckmin.
I have no reason to like Mr. Lembo. The day I was introduced to him—a meeting I went to in the vain hope of gaining his support for cultural projects that perhaps could have steered Brazil slightly away from the course of a foretold tragedy—he took the occasion to play to the gallery before some petty leftists present, labeling me as a right-wing extremist and recommending me the reading of the Bible to appease my evil political instincts. I answered nothing. I limited myself to take out of my pocket the old copy of the New Testament and of the Psalms that for years has been my companion, in order to show that I would not receive religious advice from a miserable flatterer of his own detractors.
I cannot, however, agree to the general efforts to blame his incompetence, however real, for the calamity occurred in São Paulo and Santos. It is more than a matter of injustice. It is a diversionary operation, calculated to conceal from public opinion the real agents who caused the episode, or else their identities, only too obvious, would leap out at everyone. To see them, all one has to do is put the facts together:
(1) The rebellious criminals confessed to having received aid and training from MST (Landless Workers' Movement), an organization strictly associated with the dominant Workers' Party courtiers and which in turn received help and training from another organization friendly to the government, the Colombian narcoguerrilla.
(2) The President of the Republic is personally responsible for the presence of the twelve thousand delinquents in the streets who spread terror and death among the population of São Paulo. It makes no sense to accuse the State government of being unprepared for the situation and at the same time to exonerate the Federal government that brought it about. By releasing these criminals, aware that they kept telephone contact with their leaders in jail and that they were prepared for large scale terrorist acts, the Workers' Party Presidency of the Republic not only set fire to a State of the Federation but also made use of the flames to burn down the reputation of a tiny local adversary.
(3) It is absolutely inconceivable for a war operation of colossal proportions, involving three subversive organizations of the magnitude of the PCC (First Command of the Capital), the MST, and the FARC, to have been prepared without any news about it ever reaching the strategic coordination of the Left in the continent, the São Paulo Forum, whose founder and chronic president—on temporary leave—is better known nowadays as the President of Brazil but who has never ceased to work for that organization.
For the past fifteen years the only occupation of Brazilian radical chic media has been to conceal or underestimate reality to keep the people under the control of the leftist gang in spite of all the internal plots that split it. Mission was accomplished once again. But reality now is too large and too bloody to disappear by means of copydesk magic arts. A murderous attack with clear insurrectional characteristics was prompted with direct or indirect complicity of the Presidency of the Republic, if not under its guidance. Truly, there is not a single person who is not aware of it. Even the brain of a population made torpid by decades of "cultural revolution" cannot blind itself altogether to such obviousness.
It does not mean, of course, that the public knowledge of the facts will do any harm to their authors. In a civilized country, even a remote link between a President of the Republic and the authors of that barbarity would lead to his immediate removal from office and his criminal indictment. But Brazil has already been tamed and trained to answer with adulatory smiles to every insult and aggression that comes from an ideologically approved source. The country will bow down in dumb servility to yet another cynical imposition from the enlightened elites that lead it, inevitably, towards the abyss.
As to Mr. Lembo, he is being made a scapegoat because he has the dullness and even the physique de rôle appropriate for that. He does not understand what is going on, nor does he know whom he serves with the grotesque spectacle of his impotence. He is not guilty, except for being a fool.
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