Forrest Hylton

Discussions of genocide often hinge on intent, but the extermination of a people can result as an unintended consequence of the violent pursuit of trade, private property, profit and state sovereignty: the fever for gold in Hispaniola after 1492, for example, or California after 1848. In Brazil as elsewhere in the Western hemisphere, conquest and genocide in pursuit of El Dorado continue.

To the extent that history repeats itself, it does so in spiral fashion, rather than exactly, and more often as tragedy than farce. Yesterday in Brasília, when a bolsonarista mob briefly invaded the Praça dos Três Poderes and vandalised Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidential Palace (already looted by Bolsonaro himself, who stole everything except the bathroom fixtures; vandals shat and pissed all over the place), elements of both were in evidence. By causing chaos and destruction, and alleging electoral fraud, the mob hoped to force the army to intervene – as it had been demanding, to no effect, in the ‘civilian’ encampments (full of retired, reserve and active military personnel) that sprang up in front of army barracks throughout Brazil after Lula’s victory on 30 October. Before the elections, the Pentagon, CIA and State Department all made clear that the US government has no appetite for a fascist coup in Brazil at the moment. To say the 8 January plot was far-fetched is an understatement.

On 28 December, Luis Fernando ‘el Macho’ Camacho, the governor of Bolivia’s wealthy lowland department of Santa Cruz, was arrested and flown to La Paz, where a judge remanded him in custody. He will spend the next four months in Chonchocoro prison, pending trial for his part in the October 2019 coup. Camacho declared himself proud to have taken part in ‘the greatest struggle in history’. The Catholic Church called his arrest a ‘kidnapping’ and claimed that no coup had taken place in 2019. On 30 December, Jair Bolsonaro boarded the Brazilian presidential plane for the last time, on his way to Orlando, Florida.

Along with Roslyn and Howard Zinn, and Carol and Noam Chomsky, Alice and Staughton Lynd belonged to a generation of radical married couples in the United States who took controversial, unpopular public stands – on Civil Rights at home, on Vietnam and subsequent wars abroad – regardless of the consequences, and held fast to lifelong commitments. Staughton died last week, at the age of 92. ‘I lost my opportunity to make a living as a teacher when I tried to go all-out to stop the Vietnam War,’ he said in 2009.

‘Tá na hora de Jair/arrumar mala e já ir/já ir embora’ (‘It’s time for Jair [Bolsonaro] to pack his bags and go’). All week long, the song kept playing, people kept singing it – waiters, street sweepers, doormen and women, shop assistants, rubbish collectors – and according to word on the beach at Porto da Barra in Salvador da Bahia on Monday morning, it was number two on Spotify. You hear it everywhere. More than any other city and state in Brazil, Salvador and Bahia vote for Lula, not Bolsonaro, who has never won a single district in the country’s third-largest city; Bolsonaro lost the state by 3.75 million votes, with Lula taking 72.1 per cent. When the sun set on Sunday, at roughly 5.30 p.m., Rio Vermelho in Salvador was a sea of people, expectant and dressed in red, waving white banners, awaiting the results of the most important presidential elections in anyone’s lifetime – perhaps the most important the world has seen this century.