The coup plotter and the murderer

On Sunday, February 25, a crowd of supporters summoned by former president Jair Bolsonaro packed the main avenue of São Paulo.

Investigated as the mentor of a coup d'état, the right-wing extremist needed to demonstrate that he still holds a significant part of the hearts and minds of Brazilians.

As was predictable, he succeeded.

However, to understand more deeply what Bolsonaro represents, we must go far beyond the large cities of the southeast of the country.

It is necessary to look away a few thousand kilometers north of São Paulo and look at a city of 27,000 inhabitants on the Trans-Amazon highway called Medicilandia.

Darci Alves Pereira, murderer of the environmentalist Chico Mendes, settled there.

And he began a new-old life as a supporter of Jair Bolsonaro.

Now as “Pastor Daniel”, an identity associated with evangelical churches, the confessed author of the crime that shocked the world was inaugurated as local president of the Liberal Party in January.

What makes it possible for the man who in 1988 executed the most renowned defender of the Amazon with a shotgun shot to the chest to assume the presidency of Bolsonaro's party - he was dismissed after press revelations - and be a pre-candidate for councilor is exactly what keeps Bolsonarism alive.

What we now call Bolsonarism already existed long before, but without a name and a face that would give it cohesion and organization.

This was Bolsonaro's decisive contribution to strengthening the fascist extreme right.

In the Legal Amazon, a region that covers nine States and more than half of the Brazilian territory, this mentality—understood here as a way of existing, thinking and moving—dominates elections and daily life.

If for the world Chico Mendes was a “hero”, for a significant part of the population of the Amazon, made up of people who came from other States to earn a living from the exploitation of the jungle, the environmental leader was nothing more than an obstacle that had to be eliminated.

His murderer, therefore, would have provided a “service” that they consider “legitimate.”

These people do not see themselves as criminals, but as “pioneers”, “defenders of progress”, “good citizens”.

And this is how they are recognized in the Amazonian cities, where land thieves, loggers and illegal mining bosses occupy the main political positions and own a large part of the businesses.

With the redemocratization of Brazil and the 1988 Constitution, which recognized the rights of indigenous peoples, these “pioneers” began to be seen and treated as ugly, dirty and evil, and their power was partially limited.

Like his mirror, by reaching power with his votes, Bolsonaro redeemed and “liberated” them, expanding the limits beyond the law.

The taste of this redemption—and of what they call “freedom”—will not be erased soon or easily, perhaps never.

Religious redemption was still missing, since the Catholic Church in the Amazon was linked to Liberation Theology and many of the current leaders of the left were trained in the base ecclesial communities.

With the rise and expansion of the evangelical churches, which today form Bolsonaro's most resilient support base, they achieved this other layer.

So much so that, as “Pastor Daniel,” the murderer of Chico Mendes usually preaches without any shame: “In everything we do, we must put God in the middle.”

The fact that the murderer chose this city in the trans-Amazon region for his redemption offers an additional degree of astonishment.

Medicilancia is named after Emílio Garrastazu Médici, general and president during the period when there was the most kidnapping, torture and murder during the Brazilian dictatorship, and who also turned the destruction of the Amazon into a state project.

This is the affiliation of Bolsonaro, Bolsonarism and “Pastor Daniel.”

And it will survive even Bolsonaro.

Translation by

Meritxell Almarza

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