The other side

By Leandro Fortes, for Journalists for Democracy 

On the same day that the commander of the United States Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, apologized for participating in a farce alongside President Donald Trump, another general, the Brazilian Luiz Eduardo Ramos, head of the Government Secretariat, inaugurated a new type of sycophancy, four-star flattery: he confessed to having infiltrated a demonstration against Jair Bolsonaro in Brasília, in which he claims to have detected members of the Workers' Party disguised in green and yellow.

Milley, the highest-ranking US military officer, regretted walking from the White House to Lafayette Square, where Trump took a picture with a Bible in front of a church damaged by protesters during anti-racism demonstrations following the death of George Floyd, who was suffocated by a white police officer in Minneapolis. In the general's view, his presence gave the impression that the American military has constitutional permission to interfere in the petty politics of local governments.

They don't have it, nor do they want it. Not in their country. They leave that to the servants of banana republics, like today's Brazil, where General Ramos, still on active duty, gives an interview stating that, although the Army doesn't want to participate in a coup d'état, it's best for the other side not to push their luck.

The “other side,” make no mistake, is any and all opposition to the madman who currently governs us, but Ramos and the uniformed clique installed in federal government positions always target the left – or the “communists,” ghosts that all generations of post-1964 military officers have pursued in a manner as stupid as it is obsessive. It is for this reason that the general, according to himself, donned a cap and sunglasses to infiltrate the enemy.

We are talking about a grown man, 64 years old, an active-duty military officer, who, instead of commanding a troop – a mission for which the taxpayer has been paying his salary for more than four decades – is indulging, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, in frolicking among the crowd.

Just like General Augusto Heleno, head of the Institutional Security Office (which is a ready-made joke), and the current Minister of Health, the ineffable General Eduardo Pazuello, Secretary Luiz Eduardo Ramos is a result of the neglect to which the military has been relegated since the redemocratization of the country in 1985.

Left to their own devices, without any intervention from civilian authorities in their training schools, the military stagnated in the Cold War and in the only role they were given in that theater of yesteryear: the subordinate role of an occupying army, with the mission of hunting, arresting, torturing, and murdering left-wing compatriots.

The result of this life lost in anachronism is this olive-green tragedy that convulses, melancholically, in the Palácio do Planalto (Presidential Palace).