In the coming weeks it will be 60 years since the coup against Joao Goulart in Brazil.
And it seems that Brazilian politics is preparing to remember it by recreating similar behaviors in another context, playing on the edge of the precipice.
The judicial investigation into the attempt by former president Jair Bolsonaro and his close collaborators to prevent the inauguration of his successor Lula da Silva, the duel between the two and the incidence of external factors, with statements by Lula that raise perplexity, take us back to so many similar episodes in Latin American history.
Failed or completed coups d'état, bloody or bloodless interruptions of constitutional mandates, overthrow of presidents or prevention of their taking office, were common practices during the 20th century.
Curzio Malaparte, Italian journalist, diplomat and writer who initially adhered to fascism and then abjured it and suffered it first hand, observed the phenomenon in Europe in the 1920s: liberal democracies were falling under the siege of radicalized left and right. .
In “Techniques of the Coup d'état”, a book published in 1931, Malaparte deals with different emblematic cases of attempts to seize power, some successful, others frustrated, from Napoleon to Louis Bonaparte, from Lenin and Trotsky to Mussolini and Hitler.
He maintained that the conquest and defense of a State were issues that obeyed rules and procedures that had to be understood, both to use them and to confront them, beyond economic, social or ideological conditions.
In Latin America under this same modality, coups d'état were prepared and carried out in the name of democracy and against communism.
Now it is different, the democracies have put down more roots, the Armed Forces are more reluctant to be dragged into coup adventures, there are judicial powers and civil societies whose actions and voices are more difficult to silence, although there will be no shortage of those who will try, and although in the networks propagate new forms of psychological action and “climates of opinion.”
The truth is that in the digital age, everything is exposed and visible: Bolsonaro himself was in charge of filming the conspiracy meetings, evidence that is attached to the judicial process against him.
And that, 60 years after the '64 coup, he serves the former Brazilian president to take revenge against his successor, who seems to pay tribute to that same game with his recent controversial statements.
Curzio Malaparte would have a gallery of characters to add several Latin American chapters to his classic work.
First as a tragedy, then as a farce, or whatever it was, history never repeats itself... but, as Mark Twain said, it often rhymes.