A power dynamic that pits institutions against citizens.

I don't know to what extent Brazilian society has realized that the combination of figures like Wilson Witzel, governor of Rio, Sérgio Moro, Minister of Justice, and Marcelo Bretas, federal judge, all under the wing of Jair Bolsonaro and his family, partners in the Presidency of the Republic, within the same power scheme, will hardly end well. This represents excessive political extravagance and a threat to the civil rights of Brazilians by an elite that harbors total indifference to social rights, the destruction of which is on this government's agenda, notably in the so-called "reform" of Social Security.

These shadowy figures, insofar as they consider the last elections a definitive mandate for the exercise of absolute power, will end up leading the country to a carnage, more serious than what happened now in Rio at Ludmila's parade on her float. The police must become 007s, those agents with a license to kill. Moro's law includes among the situations that justify "shooting down" the alleged criminal the fear of him, something absolutely subjective, therefore impossible to evaluate in concrete terms whether or not there was excess on the part of the shooter. It is an individual risk that easily becomes a collective risk.

The very real possibility of collusion at the level of the three main institutions of the Republic – Executive, Legislative, and Judicial – to distort civil rights in the name of combating insecurity places us on the brink of a precipice, a civilian AI-5 (Institutional Act No. 5). Not every security problem has social roots, but those that do will never be permanently resolved through violence and police killings. I agree that, under the current circumstances, there is no definitive short-term solution to the problem. For that, there are prisons.

But something must be done now with a view to the medium and long term.

This immoral government, which so loudly proclaims its intention to kill criminals, has not taken a single concrete initiative since Temer to combat unemployment, the main cause of insecurity. On the contrary, it objectively promotes insecurity by leaving 13 million workers unemployed and without alternatives, and another 13 million underemployed. Of course, most of them, for moral reasons, will find a way to make a living outside of crime. A few, in percentage terms, seeing themselves without other options, will turn to crime and marginality. They are enough to spread insecurity throughout the country, especially in our major cities.

If the Brazilian Army didn't know this, it found out during the federal intervention in Rio last year. The interventor, General Walter Braga, requested R$ 3,2 billion to supplement strictly security initiatives in the social sphere. He did receive help to buy vehicles and for logistics, but it was far from the resources needed to bring social programs to the peripheries. The intervention was a resounding failure. It in no way enabled an increase in security in Rio. And it could have served to teach Witzel, Moro, Bretas, and Bolsonaro that killing criminals is not a way to make the country safer.

The proliferation of crime in a chain that begins in childhood, progresses through adolescence, and is completed in adulthood will never be broken without consistent social programs. And it's no use trying to solve it simply by increasing the number of prisons. Senator Roberto Requião, when governor of Paraná, built 12 prisons in the state. In a short time, they were overcrowded. The reason is that the Judiciary, in its zeal to punish, sends low-risk prisoners to jail who could serve their compensatory sentences outside of prison, turning the prison into a laboratory for crime. At least in this case, and for children and adolescents, we have a situation that is resolved not by punishing more, but by punishing less.

What characterizes the real insecurity we find ourselves in is not only the open criminality of marginal individuals, but the criminality emerging from the political elite. Uniting all state institutions on the same side against the unarmed citizen is an appeal to civil disobedience. It is time to reinstate the Tiradentes Tribunal, which played a significant role in the fight against the dictatorship, to bring this singular dictatorship, which is closing all the openings of a pressure cooker that, with no other way out, will eventually explode, to the dock of public opinion.