The Sand Captains versus the Woods Captain

The current situation in Brazil makes me recall Jorge Amado's masterpiece. With its poignant plot, dealing with abandoned children stealing and struggling to survive in Salvador, it exposes and reveals a dark side of Brazil that stubbornly reproduces itself daily: the heirs of the enslaved continue to wander aimlessly in the streets, in the centers of the capitals, in the alleys and backstreets of the favelas, "surviving in hell."

Meanwhile, the foreman, or his heir, the current overseer of the Brasil farm – whose owner resides at the White House plantation – incessantly demonstrates that contempt for poor, Black, and favela-dwelling people is the hallmark of his apolitical stance. In the midst of the pandemic, the majority of the population of this devastated land suffers the wounds of oblivion. Perhaps the thirty thousand deaths Bolsonaro has desired for years will come to light without the need for his much-touted civil war. But the virus, it's worth reminding the foreman, doesn't discriminate between oppressors and oppressed.

The captain, continuing the metaphorical-literary journey, is a faithful portrait of the obedience and subjugation that the slave hunters endured in relation to their masters: he is, tragically comically, just another servant aspiring to acceptance and recognition from his plantation owner. The aberration that has taken over the Palácio do Planalto, in this sense, will go down in history only as an ignorant and submissive vassal to the commands of his northern boss. If the intention is to rave and announce the cure for the virus, for example, making a beautiful lobby for the current owner of the hereditary captaincy of Brazil, Mr. Donald Trump, so be it. The motto is blatant vassalage and debauchery.

It is therefore of utmost importance and urgency to eradicate both the virus and the worm simultaneously. And to that end, as understood by Pedro Bala, the leader of the Sand Captains from the aforementioned author, it is necessary that class consciousness permeates, entering the hills, stilt houses and shacks, into the pores and minds of the poor and destitute, so that they know and understand the incessant process of exploitation of which they have been a central part for centuries.

They stole their souls and crushed their dignity. In contrast, within every poor Brazilian lies a captain of the sands, ready to awaken. The favela, teeming with "restless creatures, survivors of massacres and the laws of the jungle," will descend; Bolsonaro and his cronies, heirs of the tormentors of the quilombos, will fall.