Bolsonaro's fear and the heart of Emperor Pedro I

Engraving of the coronation ceremony of Pedro I of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, on December 1, 1822. PHAS (Universal Images Group via Getty)

Brazil will celebrate this September 7 the 200th anniversary of its Independence.

The anniversary occurs days before the presidential elections of October 2, which are presented as dramatic and covered in unknowns due to the attitude of President Jair Bolsonaro of –one day in and the other out– implying that he will not accept the result in case of defeat.

Bolsonaro says he does not trust the polls, the same ones that gave him victory in 2018 with one of the fastest and safest vote counting mechanisms in the world.

The president's fear is that if he is defeated, he could end up in jail.

Bolsonaro's great obsession is based on the fact that he accumulates a whopping 160 criminal charges, of which 44 fall on his conduct during the pandemic.

The president, considered a genocide for the way he deals with the coronavirus that has claimed nearly 700,00 fatalities in the country, reacts to the accusations outside of himself.

This same Monday, before 700 businessmen at an event in São Paulo, he shouted: “They say I'm going to end up in jail.

By God who is in heaven, I will never go to jail."

Later he affirmed that he feels

, that is, immortal.

Faced with the possibility of losing power, Bolsonaro has a mantra: "Only God kicks me out of here."

While threatening to strike a blow if he loses the elections, the president is trying to bring back from Portugal the heart of Emperor Pedro I, which is kept in a church in the city of Porto in a kind of reliquary and which every 10 years receives injections of chloroform for preservation.

The idea of ​​bringing the heart of the person who proclaimed the country's independence is already underway, as revealed by the Brazilian press.

For this, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been mobilized, which would already be in talks with the Portuguese Government.

The transparent urn with the heart of the emperor nicknamed "the liberator" would be transported on a plane of the Brazilian Armed Forces.

The idea has an obvious political background.

Bolsonaro, the first military president of democracy, defends since he was an unknown deputy the advantages of the dictatorship that, according to him, "returned lost freedoms to Brazil", and wants to take advantage of the 200 years of Independence to repeat what the military officers did in 1972, when the unburied body of the emperor was brought from Portugal.

Brazil was then experiencing an apparent national euphoria.

He had won the World Cup in Mexico and the dictatorship spoke of a very supposed economic prosperity, which covered up the shadows of the tortures and executions of those who were considered "communists" and "enemies of the country".

The arrival of the body of the emperor was then a great event.

The unburied remains of him had an imposing national wake when they traveled half of Brazil.

Even in schools, celebrations and classes were organized to explain how Emperor Pedro I, with his famous cry of “Independence or death”, was the one who gave Brazil Independence.

The act was immortalized in a 31-meter monumental painting by Pedro Américo.

The Brazilian press has seen in Bolsonaro's intention a smoke screen to hide the difficulties in which his candidacy finds itself.

While all the polls show Lula da Silva as the winner, the arrival of the emperor's heart would mean a repetition of the commemorations that the generals of the dictatorship organized 50 years ago to cover up their atrocities.

As the historian Joana Monteleone has written in

"if in 1972 the macabre burial of Pedro I was an attempt to hide the deaths and torture, now in 2022 the arrival of the monarch's heart would try to cover up the new wave of death caused by the management disaster of the pandemic, the destruction of the Amazon and the hunger resulting from a suicidal economic policy.”

Bolsonaro placed (and covered with privileges and benefits) more than 6,000 soldiers in the Government and in State institutions, and today he has a large part of the support of the Army.

His attempt to repatriate the heart of Pedro I is an attempt to strengthen himself at the polls, at the same time that he tries to gain all possible military support to hold on to power in case he loses the elections.

Meanwhile, many of those who had voted for him in 2018, seeing him as a renovator of the worn-out political class, a champion against corruption and a politician capable of boosting the economy, today admit regret.

Days ago, a simple and unknown woman surprised public opinion by crying out for forgiveness on social networks for having voted for Bolsonaro.

She revealed that she was horrified when at the height of the covid, the president came to imitate with a jocular air the rattles of those who in the State of Amazonia died asphyxiated due to lack of oxygen due to the negligence of the Ministry of Health.

It is, in fact, one of the innumerable crimes attributed to the president in the disastrous and criminal conduct of the tragedy and for which he fears he could end up in jail and even be sentenced in international courts if he were to leave power.

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