The misogyny of the Bolsonaro government ends in justice

A woman protests against the candidacy for the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, in 2018 DANIELA MOURA

"Brazil is a virgin that every pervert on the outside wants." The clumsy metaphor that President Jair Bolsonaro used to talk about the Amazon in July 2019 is part of a collection of macho statements made by the president and part of his ministers against women, in just over a year and a half of Government. The series of attacks was compiled by the São Paulo Federal Public Ministry (MPF-SP) and became the center of a legal action for moral damages promoted by the Public Prosecutor's Office against the State. According to the public civil action, which will be tried by a federal judge in São Paulo, the president's statements, described as “misogynistic” and as “abuse of freedom of expression”, “desecrate the fundamental foundations and objectives of the Constitution. .

The accusation (read its full text in Portuguese here), authored by prosecutors Lisiane Braecher and Pedro Antonio de Oliveira Machado, brings to the legal authorities what feminism already knew. It is not today that the president deliberately attacks women and resorts, whenever possible, to macho and tasteless tricks to speak on the most varied topics. From defending the Amazon to attacking women journalists and other minorities. “Brazil cannot be the paradise of gay tourism. Whoever wants to come here to have sex with a woman, make it feel at home. Now, we cannot become known as the paradise of the gay world, ”Bolsonaro told reporters in April last year. The phrase, in addition to a form of violence against women and a homophobic attack, despises a historical struggle to remove Brazil from the label of paradise for sex tourism and, even worse, for child sex tourism.

The sexist statements made by ministers, such as the head of the Women, Family and Human Rights portfolio, Damares Alves, are also targeted by the prosecution; the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes; the former Minister of Justice, Sergio Moro, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ernesto Araújo, who said in June: "Today, if a man looks at a woman, he has already attempted rape." All phrases are documented in the process.

The federal prosecutor Pedro Antonio de Oliveira Machado explains that the prosecution had been collecting material for some time for this accusation, but, when the attacks left the plane of the statements and were specified in public actions, the cause was strengthened. "We had already been making a compilation, but that work came to an end with the repeal of the technical note of the Ministry of Health on the policy of care for victims of domestic and sexual violence," he explains. "That caught our attention, because it is more than a statement."

In June, the acting Minister of Health, Eduardo Pazuello, removed two career employees from that portfolio after they signed a technical note on health care for women during the pandemic. The document recommended counseling and access to contraceptive methods, spoke of reducing unwanted pregnancy, and referred to violence against women. It also mentioned the termination of pregnancy in the terms provided by Brazilian law, but the president interpreted it as a proposal to legalize abortion and said that there were people within the ministries who wanted to overthrow him. "As far as it depends on me, there is going to be no abortion," Bolsonaro said.

Machado explains that these actions of the Government go against the commitments assumed by Brazil at the national and international level regarding the reduction of inequalities between men and women. “These statements and actions go against the existing legal framework, which must be recognized. If a president wants to do it differently, he can look for another country that adopts the exotic norms that he prefers, "says the prosecutor. "But here there are commitments made and, even if he does not agree, he must fulfill them, like the Constitution itself." For the prosecutor, the accusation presented serves to alert that what Bolsonaro's administration has been doing against women "is not normal." "This is outside of the gains we have had in rights and equality."

For this reason, the complaint asks that the Federal Justice order the immediate blocking of "at least" 10 million reais - a little more than one and a half million euros - of the Government budget for advertising, to be used in the promotion of actions public awareness advertising. The campaign should be publicized for “a minimum period of one year” and it would expose data on gender inequality in Brazil and the vulnerability of women in relation to violence. In the case, which has yet to be tried, the prosecutors recommend that the publicity pieces be made under the guidance of the entities that defend women's rights.

Lastly, the MPF wants the State to be sentenced to pay R $ 5 million to the Fund for Diffuse Rights, as "compensation for collective social and moral damages." The prosecutor Pedro Antonio de Oliveira recalls that, beyond the compensation amounts, the case should also serve as an alert. "It often seems that there is conservative thinking on the issue of gender equality and that such a statement has no consequences," he says. "And this action is also to show that there are consequences."

"Revanchism"

For Claudia Luna, president of the Commission for Women Lawyers of the OAB (the public bar association) of São Paulo, Brazilian public policies today are against women. “Today, the Brazilian state is a state that hates women. It is a misogynistic state. It is a state that reduces public policies for women ”, she says. "That produces violations of women's rights."

According to the lawyer, the position of the president and his ministers is part of a strategy to reduce the rights won. "Since the beginning of this government there has been a decline in the guarantees of public policies dedicated to women," he says. “Bolsonaro has a revengeful attitude, he knows exactly who he is going to target. That is why we have a 130-year setback of rights ”.

In the majority (52%) among voters in 2018, women led the largest movement against Jair Bolsonaro during that campaign. Faced with the threat that the candidate posed to minorities, they marched across the country under the slogan "Not him", with just a week left before the first round. If, at that time, they also represented the majority of the voters who rejected it, according to all the electoral polls, they continue in the same position today. The most recent barometer, carried out between July 20 and 22 by PoderData - linked to the Power 360 site - shows that women (57%) are the group that most defends Bolsonaro leaving the government.

If the feminist movement did not have the strength to prevent the arrival of Bolsonaro to the Planalto, in other struggles it was victorious. It was they who rose up, in 2015, against the then president of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha, in what became known as the Feminist Spring. Today in house arrest for Operation Lava Jato, Cunha at that time represented a threat to the rights won by women and was voting on a series of projects of his own authorship, such as the one that made it difficult to care for rape victims. limiting access to the morning-after pill. No other segment of society mobilized as many people on the streets as women at that time, and the project ended up in a box.

The chances of success of the São Paulo prosecutor's office are difficult to foresee. Bolsonaro has already been sentenced to pay compensation for moral damages for having told his then-colleague Maria do Rosário, from the Workers' Party (PT), in 2014 that she was "ugly" and, therefore, did not deserve to be raped. The conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court last year. The Supreme Court itself, however, refused to judge the then presidential candidate when he was denounced by the Attorney General of the Republic for the crime of racism, in 2018, for statements made during the campaign.