Bolsonaro and pedophilia: the left needs to denounce the right's demagogic campaign.

Jair Bolsonaro said this Tuesday, the 14th, that “The left is seeking ways to decriminalize pedophilia, transforming it into a mere illness or sexual orientation.“In a post on Twitter, he also stated that he had presented a bill authored by the Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, which increases the penalty for these crimes by 50%.”

The speech, besides being malicious and attempting to link the left to pedophilia, is purely demagogic campaigning typical of the far-right. Bolsonaro is taking advantage of widespread repudiation of pedophilia to spread his fascist propaganda against the left. Naturally, sectors of the left feel cornered and seek to follow Bolsonaro's propaganda – instead of denouncing it.

The bill has not yet gone to a vote, but the development of the political struggle shows how, on several occasions in Congress, the left has positioned itself in favor of increasing penalties and laws to "combat criminals," always seeking a "good" pretext. Generally, this policy uses the most hateful elements (pedophiles, rapists, etc.) of society to justify increasing repressive laws, which in the end will not solve the problem and will only increase punitivism.

When the capitalist press, along with the far-right, was campaigning against rape and discussing violence against women, the left jumped in headfirst and voted – with the right – for laws that increase penalties for rapists and that, for example, classify femicide as a heinous crime. What the leftist parliamentarians failed to realize is that they were entering precisely into the right's demagogic campaign in defense of punishment to solve the various social problems facing the country. A religious idea to "punish sinners."

Ultimately, the point is that while the right wing engages in demagoguery to increase penalties and throw the poor population in jail, a good portion of whom have not been properly judged, the left wing, at the very least, should oppose this type of policy. At the very least, the left wing should be aware that punishment does not solve problems and opens the door to repression by the ruling classes. 

In response, the campaign should focus on the idea that the solution lies elsewhere: addressing the root of the problem, whether psychological, social, or otherwise. Otherwise, the left will simply be presenting the other side of the right-wing discourse of "the only good criminal is a dead criminal." The left needs to understand that all crimes are caused by social conditions, including psychological ones, and that even if sectors of the ruling classes are punished (like the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein), this is merely part of a political process.

We cannot fall for the far-right campaign that claims those who oppose increased penalties for pedophiles are in favor of pedophilia, or that those who oppose increased penalties for rapists are in favor of rape. This is because fascists – as the film “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini aptly reminds us – despite presenting themselves as defenders of the purest morality, are generally the worst types of society, a true scum.

The left cannot defend the punitive approach of the right, which only wants to throw more people into prisons – which, besides being overcrowded, hold many innocent people.