Lula sailing between Scylla and Charybides like Ulysses in the Strait of Messina.

There are undeniable advances in the current Lula government that are expressed, for example, in the prohibition of daily orders in military barracks praising the coup of April 3, 1964, and, above all, in the creation of a political environment favorable to the unprecedented investigation of the responsibility of high-ranking coup plotters implicated in the preparatory acts of January 8, 2023, before the Supreme Federal Court with the unanimous support of the Superior Military Court and the commanders of the three armed forces, a fact never before seen in the history of the Republic.

Dilma Rousseff's initiative in establishing the National Truth Commission (CNV) was correct and courageous, but it produced a consensus, or at least a coup-plotting hegemony, among the military. So much so that, even in 2014, the previously ostracized Bolsonaro held a rally at the Agulhas Negras Military Academy (AMAN) for newly graduated officers, a ceremony attended by the Minister of Defense, Celso Amorim – something unthinkable and a true anathema to the dogma of hierarchy and discipline, had it not been for the crystallization of aversion to the PT government within the barracks, stemming from the work carried out by the CNV. From there to the realization of the alliance with the anti-national bourgeoisie was a small step, as capital already saw itself threatened by the increasing income redistribution promoted by the PT governments. We all know, since Walter Benjamin's formulation, that capitalism will always find its emergency button in fascism.

Once that bloc was established, solidly cemented by neo-Pentecostal fundamentalism, spreading hatred of the left to the popular classes, thanks to the agenda of customs, as well as the selective and partial persecution of Lava Jato, exhaustively fueled by the hegemonic media, the sedition continued in logarithmic, albeit erratic, approaches, sometimes advancing as on September 7, 2021, sometimes retreating as expressed in the letter written by Temer soon after for Bolsonaro to apologize to Minister Alexandre de Moraes, but always in the same general direction of progression until the culmination of January 8, 2023. 

The Temer government reinstated the GSI (Institutional Security Office), ousted from the Presidential Palace by Dilma Rousseff due to its inability to produce anything positive and its role in allowing the wiretapping of the nation's highest authority. Temer remained under the tutelage of General Sergio Etchegoyen, who had openly rebelled against the National Truth Commission (CNV) because his father and uncle had been identified as torturers by our CNV and also by its Uruguayan counterpart, due to their actions in Operation Condor. His grandfather conspired against Juscelino Kubitschek and João Goulart.

After the murky episode in Juiz de Fora, some within the military wanted to proceed directly to a bloody coup. But the rational ones prevailed, convincing the radicals that it was better for them to elect Bolsonaro, henceforth unbeatable in the role of victim. And even more so, with the bonus of not having to debate with Professor Fernando Haddad. Circumstances laid a veritable egg of Columbus, favoring their electoral path with the rehabilitated captain thanks to the tenacity of Augusto Heleno, who had worked with him as his instructor at AMAN (Agulhas Negras Military Academy) during the 74-77 period. Heleno convinced his peers to accept the "bad soldier"—in Geisel's words—who had been prohibited by Sarney's army minister, Leônidas Pires Gonçalves, from entering military units and whose children had not studied in military schools. 

For example, philosopher and comedian Agildo Ribeiro graduated from the Military College of Rio de Janeiro. He was the son of Captain Agildo Barata, who rebelled against Vargas in 1935, along with other military captains such as Luís Carlos Prestes and Apolônio de Carvalho, a hero of three nations because he fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and later resisted the four years of Nazi occupation in Vichy France, earning him the French Legion of Honor. Apolônio returned to Brazil, married to the Frenchwoman Renê, who lived through the horror of having her husband and children imprisoned by the military dictatorship. He was exchanged for the German ambassador along with 38 other political prisoners and would return with the amnesty of 1979 to become the first member of the Workers' Party (PT), at its founding on February 10, 1980, at the Sion College, in the company of Mário Pedrosa and Sergio Buarque de Holanda. 

In the aftermath of the Juiz de Fora episode, the military officers who rallied around Bolsonaro's candidacy took the opportunity to extend military tutelage to the Supreme Federal Court (STF) with the imposition of General Fernando Azevedo in the curious "advisory" role provided to its president, Dias Toffoli, who, sweetly embarrassed, began to view the coup against the constitutionally elected president, João Goulart, as the "64 movement," according to a statement made at a meeting at the USP law school, thus defiling the best traditions of the venerable Largo de São Francisco.

Niccolò Machiavelli, in his work "The Prince," said that a ruler needs both fortune and virtue. Lula's virtues are many, among them his shrewdness and the balance with which he executes the art of association with notorious proficiency. Lula's fortune, already proverbial, was once again demonstrated by the fact that Joe Biden, and no longer Donald Trump, is in the White House, during the course of the failed coup by Bolsonaro and his followers. The convergences between Lula and Biden revolve around environmental and climate issues, as well as the aim of reducing inequalities, easily overcoming the differences between friends, as Antony Blinken said in an interview with Globo News, avoiding a tricky question intended to confront him with Lula's recent and justified statements about the genocide perpetrated by Netanyahu against the people and their unions who built the USA, not the financiers of Wall Street. During an auto industry strike, Biden took Lula to meet with the workers. The US stance on the stillborn coup would have been different if Trump had been in power. People also need to find fortune in their struggle, especially the dispossessed of the earth.

Equally crucial was the US position in the late 70s in confronting the coup attempt by the then Minister of the Army, Silvio Frota, against the President of the Republic, a dangerous "communist," General Ernesto Geisel, who was a national developmentalist and proposed political détente from within the military regime itself, in addition to resuming trade relations with China and recognizing, before anyone else, the Angolan government of Agostinho Neto, victorious in the war of national liberation against Salazarism; all this in the name of "responsible pragmatism." 

The coup within the 1977 coup was aided by the same Augusto Heleno (Silvio Frota's aide-de-camp) in both that insane undertaking and the current one. Appointed by Bolsonaro as head of the GSI (Institutional Security Office), he used ABIN (Brazilian Intelligence Agency) to spy on opponents, authorities, and even supposed allies; Heleno went so far as to inform, in a ministerial meeting on July 5, 2022, dedicated to orchestrating the coup, that Vitor (head of ABIN) had infiltrated elements into both campaigns, which would make Richard Nixon blush, who was forced to resign for much less in the Watergate scandal in August 1974, in the wake of the crisis triggered by a botched raid by Nixon's "plumbers" on the psychiatric office of military analyst Daniel Elsberg, who denounced atrocities and corruption in the Vietnam War, as well as the Democratic National Committee and other fiascos of the spies. 

Jimmy Carter's victory in the 1977 US presidential election dealt the final blow to the conspiracy that had been methodically dismantled by the very creator of the SNI (National Information Service) and mastermind of the military dictatorship, Golbery do Couto e Silva, then Chief of Staff to Ernesto Geisel, supported by numerous military figures, including the president's brother, General Orlando Geisel, a major military leader of that time. Thus, on October 12, 1977, the day of Our Lady of Aparecida, Frota and his ragtag group, including Heleno, received checkmate.

The slow, gradual, and safe opening followed its course, but always harassed by the "sincere but radical pockets," as Geisel had dubbed them. Sometimes they set fire to the OAB DF (Brazilian Bar Association of the Federal District), sometimes they bombed the secretary of the president of the OAB RJ (Brazilian Bar Association of Rio de Janeiro), Ms. Lyda Monteiro da Silva, sometimes they aimed to blow up thousands of young people, as would have been the tragic end of the meeting with popular artists, alluding to May 1st, 1981, at Riocentro, were it not for the terrorists' own ineptitude. On the night of Lula's inauguration by the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) in 2022, they set fire to buses, cars parked at gas stations, and attacked the Federal Police headquarters. On Christmas Eve 2022, they tried to blow up a truck full of aviation kerosene at Brasília airport, starting from the encampment at the army headquarters, which, according to General Dutra, the military commander of the Planalto, was a healthy environment of much prayer. They blocked roads, Petrobras refineries, and brought down power transmission lines across the country, which requires some expertise, as does the invasion through the roof of the National Congress. According to Lula, on January 8th, someone opened the doors of the Planalto Palace, whose security is the responsibility of the GSI (Institutional Security Office). 

Lula navigates between Scylla and Charybdis in the Strait of Messina, like Ulysses from Greek mythology, and not only in the economic sphere, which is why the consistent left must support him, alongside all anti-fascist forces, in building and maintaining the broad front, without allowing reactionaries to succeed in dismantling our alliances built in favor of democracy. 

The unbreakable unity of all women and men, whose horizon is the construction of a fraternal society in a culture of peace, is the quintessential foundation of the arc of alliances, just as we, the old guard, did in the time of Ulysses Guimarães during the long 21-year journey back to civilization and the democratic rule of law. In 1973, when he was an anti-candidate alongside the indomitable Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, Ulysses was confronted by the bayonets and dogs of the Military Police of Bahia's appointed governor, ACM, and delivered the challenge to the dictatorship with fearlessness and poetic verve: "A bayonet is not a vote and a dog is not a ballot box."

One should never forget Berthold Brecht's prophetic warning in the epilogue of his 1941 play "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," parodying the struggles of Al Capone's gangsters and transposing them to the rising Nazi Germany, in which one can identify villains of the worst kind such as Hermann Göring, Goebbels, and Röhm. The German playwright's warning would sound like a prophecy of a more cruel and tyrannical reality for all humanity, only ended with the entry of the Red Army into Berlin on April 30, 1945, precipitating the Führer's suicide and the subsequent surrender of the Third Reich on May 2, 1945, after four years of titanic struggle against genocidal Nazism and its Wehrmacht, at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives. 

The German parliament, the Reichstag, had been criminally set on fire on February 27, 1933, in a farcical plot, blaming the communists, as recalled in Pablo Milanés' "Cancion por La Unidad de Latino América," to allow Adolf Hitler a free path towards total arbitrariness and opening the gates of hell that would devour 70 million lives in the Second World War. 

Twelve years later, at the end of the Battle of Berlin, the USSR flag would be planted on the same Reichstag dome by a soldier born in Dagestan, Abdoulkalkim Ismailov. Four years earlier, Bertolt Brecht had written in the epilogue of his 1941 play "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" what foreshadowed that historical moment: "Do not rejoice in his defeat, men. Even though the world has risen up to stop the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."