Bolsonaro critics hit by security law
Government accused of trying to silence dissent
SAO PAULO – Police in Brazil are starting to employ a dictatorship-era national security law against critics of President Jair Bolsonaro, while lawyers and activists rally to provide them with legal help and accuse the government of trying to silence dissent.
On Friday, demonstrators challenged police in the capital by parading with anti-Bolsonaro signs a day after four protesters were detained. They called the president “genocidal” for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and displayed a cartoon depicting him next to a Nazi swastika. Officers took no action Friday as about 40 people protested for an hour.
The national security law, which dates to 1983, near the end of the country’s military dictatorship, makes it a crime to harm the heads of the three branches of government or expose them to danger. The vague measure has recently been used to detain or investigate Bolsonaro critics.
Geography teacher Katia Garcia said she showed up in front of the president’s office Friday because the arrests had inspired her.
“They were jailed because the description ‘genocidal’ suits our president very well,” Garcia said, wearing a mask and face shield. “He has contributed to our health care system collapsing, for the lack of vaccines.”
There have been previous newsmaking charges against prominent critics of the president, including a newspaper columnist, a political cartoonist and a popular YouTube star, but the law is increasingly being employed against ordinary citizens. Courts haven’t upheld any of the arrests so far, but lawyers are expressing alarm that the tactic is becoming commonplace.
Both demonstrations in Brasilia called for Bolsonaro’s impeachment because of his administration’s alleged failings in the pandemic; Brazil has had 290,000 deaths from COVID-19. The country reported nearly 3,000 deaths each day last week.
The president has complained, most recently Thursday night during a live Facebook broadcast, that he is being unfairly vilified.
“They call me a dictator. I want you to point at one thing I did in two years and two months that was autocratic,” he said while complaining about a newspaper column that used the word genocidal to describe him.
Police in Brasilia said Thursday that the four detained protesters violated the national security law “as they showed a Swastika in association to the symbol of the president of the Republic.” But Brazil’s federal police force, which decides whether cases brought by local police deserve to go ahead in national security crimes, dismissed the case and released three of the four demonstrators. One was held on an outstanding warrant from a previous case.
Federal police have conducted more than 80 investigations under the security law during Bolsonaro’s first two years, and more than 10 in the first 45 days of 2021, according to the newspaper O Globo. The yearly average before the conservative leader took office was 11.
The cases appear to almost entirely target Bolsonaro’s critics, human rights organizations and activists said.
On Friday night, unsuccessful presidential candidate Ciro Gomes said the federal police are investigating him for calling the president “a thief ” in a radio interview in November. The request for the investigation was signed by Bolsonaro himself, Gomes said on his social media channels.