Dictatorship of April 1st: the celebration of political insanity.

By Gilvandro Filho, from Journalist for Democracy

Since almost everything in this government is fake, the decision to commemorate the military coup that installed a military dictatorship that plagued Brazil for 21 years on March 31st is understandable. Understandable is very different from acceptable. And President Jair Bolsonaro has already decided that the date will be commemorated, at least in military barracks.

Celebrating the anniversary of a dictatorship is an act of political insanity. It is a crime against the Republic and its Constitution, as a group of prosecutors from the Federal Public Ministry has already warned. Only a ruler who idolizes torturers would be capable of ordering such a bizarre celebration in the barracks.

The date, to begin with, is one of the biggest lies in our history, since nothing actually happened on that day. The coup itself was launched on April 1st. The military popularized the fateful date a day earlier to avoid being labeled April Fool's Day. Bolsonaro, as he loves fake news, will maintain the charade.

Is there anything more embarrassing, and at the same time depressing, than Bolsonaro's spokesperson, General Otávio Santana do Rego Barros, solemnly endorsing the claim that "there was no military coup in Brazil"? A historically outdated scene. Who, after so long, still repeats this mantra of wanting to transform the April 1st coup into a movement that spontaneously arose from Brazilian society? Not all military personnel continue to repeat this nonsense.

But, at the same time, it is crucial not to fail to address the consequences of this nefarious event. The darkness into which the country has plunged because of this "redeeming revolution." The institutionalized torture implemented here, with its effects amplified thanks to knowledge imported from the CIA and disseminated in "training" that the "heroes" of the Bolsonaro era received in the basements of military barracks across Brazil.

Yes, we must talk about the torture device, the electric shock machine, the dragon's chair, and the waterboarding simulations. But we must also show the cowardice of those who used these infernal tools to interrogate men, women, teenagers, and the elderly. Is this what Bolsonaro wants the military to remember on the anniversary of the coup?

We need to talk about the Brazilians who were imprisoned, killed, and disappeared, whose families never even had the right to bury them. We need to talk about the “Marias and Clarisses,” about Fernando Santa Cruz, Stuart Angel Jones, and Soledad Viedma. We need to talk about Wladimir Herzog and Manuel Fiel Filho. Will Bolsonaro and his followers ever revere them? Not at all! The president will instead salute his genocidal idols: Brilhante Ustra, Sérgio Fleury, Erasmo Dias, Gama e Silva, and Emílio Garrastazu Médici.

While the coup will be remembered in the barracks with the languor that Jair Bolsonaro recommends, in real life there will also be protests against it. Social media is already spreading the message: on that day, everyone will wear something black – in their clothes, hat, flag, window display, or ribbon hanging from their car. April 1st, 1964, is the day Brazil stopped in time. And it must be remembered as such. The day will be one of mourning.

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CHARACTER TO REMEMBER: GREGÓRIO BEZERRA

Lest we forget, here is a brief account of one of the greatest atrocities committed by these torturers in Pernambuco during the period immediately following the military coup. Always in the name of ideological combat and the fight against "atheistic and family-destroying" communism.

Immediately after the outbreak of the 64 coup, militias paid by the sugar plantation owners of the Pernambuco sugarcane region went hunting for activists, especially those linked to the deposed governments, the Communist Party, and the Peasant Leagues. In Cortês, a small municipality in the Pernambuco forest region, a group of henchmen acting on the orders of one of these sugar mill owners, José Lopes de Siqueira Santos, owner of the Estreliana sugar mill, arrested and handed over Gregório Bezerra to the Army.

A veteran communist fighter and architect of the 1935 uprising in the Northeast, Gregório was beaten like few others in those first days of April '64. He was the protagonist of horrific scenes in Casa Forte, a western neighborhood of Recife. In the streets of this upper-middle-class neighborhood, a sadistic colonel named Darcy Villocq tied Gregório's hands, neck, and waist. And he held a macabre parade. Beating him and asking people to beat him as well. He beat him with an iron bar, with wood, with his hands, with his feet. He made Gregório walk barefoot in battery acid and then on gravel. Nobody accepted the colonel's invitation. The people of Pernambuco watched, ashamed, the scenes that were broadcast on TV that night.

And the savagery only didn't culminate in Gregório's death because the nuns from a school in the neighborhood were outraged and called the wife of Governor Paulo Guerra (who was Miguel Arraes's vice-governor and assumed the governorship after the governor's arrest), who intervened and stopped the macabre circus.

Gregório remained imprisoned until 1969, when he was included among the political prisoners exchanged for the US ambassador, Charles Burke Elbrick, who had been kidnapped by the National Liberation Alliance (ALN) and the Revolutionary Movement of October 8th (MR8). He returned to Brazil with the Amnesty (1979) and was elected as an alternate federal deputy in the 1982 elections. He died in October of the following year.

Regarding Gregório, Ferreira Gullar wrote:

The story of a brave man.
I've met many brave men, and even more bullies.
Some are brave only in name, others only in appearance.
Some braved by hunger, others by overeating.
Not to mention those who are just men with henchmen behind them.
But there are many men of worth in this land.
Someone who is brave without killing people, but who is not afraid of being killed.
Someone who loves their people and fights for them.
Like Gregório Bezerra, made of iron and flower.

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