The fact that Jair Bolsonaro would make poor governmental decisions had never been news for anyone, but it certainly is impressive how much of damage he has caused in roughly a month of his presidency. It is hard to know where to start, and the sentiment of revolt amongst Brazilians is tangible on the corner of every street.
It all started when he began to select the ministers of each area, choosing unfitting people left and right for the different positions. Damares Alves, Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, for instance, was one of the first ones to cause disappointment. She is openly pro-life and against feminists, claiming to have masters of Education, Constitutional and Family Right without ever receiving a college diploma.
Alongside Damares, there is Onyx Lorenzoni (Minister of the Civilian House), who is a defender of making the Disarmament Statute more flexible, of the reduction of the penal age, and is against racial quotas. Topics which are of great importance to Brazil may now suffer the consequences of the new Minister’s retrograde and prejudiced view possibly leading to dangerous setbacks for the country. Bolsonaro’s pack also wouldn’t be complete without the presence of the infamous Ricardo Vélez Rodriguez, the Minister of Education that believes that Brazil’s 1964 military coup is a date to “remember and celebrate.”
Unfortunately, it does not stop there. Tereza Cristina, or “Muse of Venom,” (as the environmentalists like to call her), the new Minister of Agriculture, is a hardcore defender of the approval of the law project that loosens up the rules of inspection and application of pesticides in the country, being a complete risk to Brazil’s environment and citizens. On the subject of the environment, there is also Ricardo Salles, the new Minister of that area. He is completely against groups such as the MST (The Landless Movement), the Quilombola communities (African descendents that live in rural areas) and Indigenous tribes while being fervently in favor of the rural landowner, reinforcing the mistaken idea that those groups don’t deserve national attention or importance.
The ministers mentioned previously are just a sample of the 22 people that he has selected to make decisions alongside him. The crowd Bolsonaro has arranged for Brazil’s next four years is so unbelievable that the constructed scenery is almost cartoonish, as if the ministers were characters finally partnering up with their evil master.
Besides the poor choice in ministers, Brazil’s new President has already pulled off unreasonable decrees for every aspect of Brazil that you can imagine, starting off with the extinction of the Ministries of Social Development, Sport, Culture and others. Alongside those things he has been committing rapidly to making the country more unsafe and less integrated then it has ever been.
Another topic that has caused indignation between Brazilians is the decisions Bolsonaro has been making regarding the demarcation and regulation of indigenous lands, and areas reminiscent of quilombos. The preservation of these areas is of immense importance and the demarcation is a great responsibility since these groups have been on the edge of society, suffering from constant exclusion and prejudice for as long as the history of Brazil goes. Instead of favoring these groups he has given the duty of demarcation to the Ministry of Agriculture– a Ministry which has obviously divergent objectives since its main goal is to support the rural-based economy regardless of the effect this has on other aspects of the environment and the people who live in it. With these decisions he has practically put a bullet to the head of the National Indigenous Organization (Funai) and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra), favoring a much more possibly harmful environment to those communities.
It is also important to mention that one of the first decisions he has made in favor of “safety” was signing a decree that facilitates gun ownership, which ironically seems to him (and his voters) that will take a positive toll on Brazil’s exorbitant crime rate. In this decree, the range of people that have what is called “actual need” to own a gun is amplified to any resident of any Brazilian state with more than 10 homicides per 100 thousand inhabitants, in other words practically every state of the country.
Sadly, everything that has been going on dating to his election had been predictable since his first speech. All that is left for Brazilians is to gather and rise before what seems to be a premeditated catastrophe, it is important that there are unity and power to guide the country through whatever storms it may come across.
Photo: PR/Marcos Corrêa
