Bolsonaro Military - Brazil's President-elect Jair Bolsonaro walks past Brazilian army generals during a graduation ceremony at the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in Resende, Brazil on December 1, 2018. Photo: Leo Correa/AP Brazil's President-elect Jair Bolsonaro walks past the Brazilian army. generals during a graduation ceremony at the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in Rezende, Brazil, on December 1, 2018. Photo: Leo Correa/AP
Bolsonaro granted new powers to the Brazilian military. The generals will not hand them over easily. President Jair Bolsonaro's 2022 election hopes have faded, but the armed forces are not ready to give up their newfound wealth and influence.
Bolsonaro Military
"Leader, leader!" chanted dozens of uniformed cadets along the shores of the Agulhas Negras Military Academy, Brazil's equivalent of West Point. The young people gathered to hear a special visitor, Jair Bolsonaro, a member of Congress at the time. "We have to change Brazil, okay?" Bolsonaro told a crowd in 2014, just a month after the left-wing Workers' Party secured a fourth consecutive presidential election by a narrow margin. "Some will die along the way, but I am ready in 2018, God willing, to try to move this country to the right." Loud applause was heard.
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro Attends Army Day Celebrations, In Brasilia, Brazil April 19, 2022. Reuters/adriano Machado Stock Photo
Bolsonaro, a far-right ideologue and former army captain, kept his promise. In 2018, he was elected president with an outspoken retired general as his running mate.
It wasn't always an obvious turnaround for Brazil's most powerful politician and institution. For many years, Bolsonaro was treated by military leaders for his outrageous acts of defiance. In 2014, as a visit to Agulhas Negras shows, things had clearly changed. The joint power play was already underway years before its implementation.
In office, Bolsonaro quickly appointed active and reserve military members to key civilian posts in his administration, thousands more than any democratically elected president in modern history, ceding responsibility for large chunks of the federal budget and control of the government. Because Bolsonaro is known to have little patience for the minutiae of his position (he works short hours), critics have often wondered who really runs Brazil: the generals or the president.
Since the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, the army has not had such power. The military has used Bolsonaro's presidency as a way to reassert political power in more subtle ways than in the past, while more effectively shielding itself from public discontent. In the far-right wave, 72 military and police candidates were elected to state and federal office in 2018. Two years later, another 859 won municipal elections.
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Military officers rose to high positions in the government. Some of them were revealed to be at the center of the Bolsonaro administration's most brazen public corruption schemes and anti-democratic activities. Until now, military appointees have avoided prosecution or even major scrutiny, perhaps thanks to thinly veiled threats to members of Congress and the media.
This reality stands in stark contrast to the public image that Bolsonaro and the military have long cultivated as fixers of civilian political corruption, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Changing public image could become a liability for Bolsonaro and his military allies in the elections this October.
The military, for its part, is taking steps to ensure that its newfound power is maintained regardless of who wins the presidential race.
Army cadets march during a graduation ceremony at the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in Rezende, Brazil, on December 1, 2018.
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According to an analysis by Estadão newspaper, Bolsonaro will inject about $5 billion in new federal funds into Brazil's armed forces and police before the end of his first term, a significant sum in a country with a limited discretionary budget of about $19 a year. billion and by a president who promised to cut spending. Defense received the highest discretionary funding of any ministry in the 2021 and 2022 budgets.
While the military has prospered, there have been deep cuts in federal spending on health, education, the environment, science, culture, small-scale agriculture, food security, and anti-poverty programs. However, in the past three years, the military has been spared the budget cuts, pension reforms and wage freezes that have plagued Brazil's civilian ministries and public workforce.
In the past three years, the military has been spared the budget cuts, pension reforms and wage freezes that have plagued Brazil's civilian ministries and public workforce.
Brazil spends more on its military than the next six Latin American countries combined, yet is notorious for relying on outdated equipment. That's because more than 83 percent of its budget goes to salaries and benefits, most of which pays for large pensions and retirement benefits. Bolsonaro, who took office promising dramatic austerity reforms, has slashed social security benefits and public sector pensions, but the military has not faced the harshest crackdown. Military jobs have even seen a pay rise.
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The president also floated benefits to promote goodwill between police and fire agencies, most of which are paramilitary forces, including giving some officers significant raises.
Bolsonaro has repeatedly supported but not passed a bill that would make it more difficult to prosecute police and military personnel for crimes such as murder. Such prosecutions are already shockingly rare in a country where officers kill more than 17 civilians a day, according to undisclosed official statistics, and where organized crime gangs led by security forces are a growing threat.
One of the longer-term initiatives of Bolsonaro's pro-military agenda includes a push to "militarize" state and local public schools. In exchange for federal funds and logistical support, the schools adopt a military-style curriculum and create a minimal number of jobs for police and military reservists, who also take over school management. Nationally, statistics are sketchy, but in the state of Paraná, the governor has promised to militarize about 10 percent of the more than 2,000 schools under his jurisdiction.
Thanks to Bolsonaro, some active military officers and reservists, like those who work in public schools, are able to use a loophole to inflate their salaries. Now, they can receive their full salary or pension and still receive full pay for their other public sector work, even if the total salary exceeds the state's constitutional limits of about $90,000 a year. By comparison, half of Brazilian workers earn $2,775 a year, the national minimum wage, or less.
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Beneficiaries of this new regulation include the president, who himself got a 6 percent increase, the vice president, and the military in the cabinets. Reserve General Joaquim Silva y Luna, appointed by Bolsonaro to run Petrobras, the state-owned oil giant, earns almost six times the limit, a fact that has even drawn criticism from within the ranks.
Brazil's Social Liberal Party (PSL) presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, right, holds a girl in military uniform during a military school graduation ceremony on August 17, 2018 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
It is unlikely that the military has ever again meddled in Brazilian politics solely for monetary benefits. "It's important, but it's not everything," Piero Leirner, an anthropology professor who has spent his career studying the military, told The Intercept. "What shocks me the most is the restructuring of the state, changing the legal provisions to ensure convergence of decisions regarding the army."
Ana Penido, a defense researcher at São Paulo State University, agrees. "Many analysts are raising the possibility that there is something like a US deep state in Brazil," he said, "a framework where it doesn't matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge, some things always remain." the same ".
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"Many analysts raise the possibility that something similar to the US deep state has taken up residence in Brazil."
Both experts point specifically to the Office of Institutional Security, or GSI, a cabinet-level body overseen by a military officer whose duties range from serving as the president's chief national security adviser to directly overseeing Brazil's intelligence agency, ABIN. The GSI was closed by former President Dilma Rousseff in 2015, who transferred its duties to civilian control, but it was reinstated shortly after her impeachment.
Bolsonaro appointed General Augusto Heleno, a former aide to the hard-line general who attempted a palace coup during the dictatorship, to head the GSI. Heleno was part of an elite group of generals who advised Bolsonaro during the 2018 campaign and remained an influential voice in the president's inner circle during years of infighting and intrigue. In turn, he greatly expanded the GSI's power, expanding the agency to gather far-reaching and more politicized intelligence and deploying ABIN spies to infiltrate key ministries.
"It's a more secretive project being built under the Bolsonaro government that could continue to influence power regardless of who wins the election," Penido said.
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As Bolsonaro's political future dims, finding a way to hang on to power has become increasingly important for the military. "I don't think they like Bolsonaro the way he is," Penido said of the generals. "Their priority is the military 'family' and they will join anyone who can prove
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