Security law used to detain opponents of president

SAO PAULO — Police in Brazil are starting to employ a dictatorshipera 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 antiBolsonaro signs a day after four protesters were detained. They had 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 from 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. “He has contributed to our health care system collapsing, for the lack of vaccines. Police can’t silence us.”

On several instances, the president has complained that he is being unfairly vilified, most recently Thursday night during a live Facebook broadcast. “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.

Brasilia police said 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 groups and activists say.