Klaus Hart Brasilientexte

This is a new year filled with expectations. The first is avoiding the return of inflation. Fortunately there is no indication that we will see the same film we saw during the last months of the Sarney government when inflation reached 80% a month. What is serious is that speculation is accelerating, production and exports are diminishing, the growth of the GNP has slowed down, privatizations are multiplying and social inequality is increasing.

 This is the year to commemorate (= remember) that 50 years ago a coup toppled the constitutionally elected government installing a military dictatorship where the fate of politicians who disappeared has never being revealed and those, particularly in the Armed Forces, who tortured, assassinated, kidnapped in the name of, and under cover of, the State, have not been punished.  http://www.hart-brasilientexte.de/2013/11/19/brasiliens-folter-diktatur1964-1985-mit-wem-bundesausenminister-willy-brandt-damals-bilaterale-vertrage-unterzeichnet-das-massaker-an-stahlarbeitern-unter-gouverneur-jose-magalhaes-pinto/

http://www.hart-brasilientexte.de/2013/06/21/brasilien-realitaten-und-nach-mitteleuropa-durchgeschaltete-regierungs-und-elitenpropaganda/

http://www.hart-brasilientexte.de/2010/02/01/brasiliens-erfolgreiche-auslandspropaganda-2009-uber-40-millionen-euro-investiert-laut-brasil-economico-enge-zusammenarbeit-mit-medien-europas/

While bread is lacking, there will be a circus: The World Cup. Brazil will participate limping, with low morale, with a team stressed out by the obligation to make money. The art of football, with Didi’s feats, Tostao’s dribble, Vava’s advances, Pele’s goals and Garrincha’s ballet, is gone.

It would appear that our team will act as good hosts and will exit with bowed heads unless there is a miracle, an unexpected result which will prove, as far as football goes, that God is also Brazilian.

Actually, this is the year to wipe Brazil clean. On October 5th voters will go to the polls to elect seven new civil servants: one state deputy, one federal deputy, one senator, a governor, a vice governor, a President and vice president. This is the chance to extirpate from the Legislative Assemblies deputies linked to the illegal lottery and to cartels who are more interested in increasing their own salaries than in serving the needy population.

We will be able to make a general clean sweep in Brasilia, committing to the trash can deputies and senators who have been in command for many years giving little service, corrupted by building contractors and oligopolies, with no vision of the meaning of citizenship or democracy.

In the state governments voters will be able to pension off the old foxes who suffer from ‘pleonexia’ – the insatiable appetite for power, according to Plato, who understood politics and politicians.

The presidential succession has not yet been defined, but now is the time to avoid Brazil again becoming a US colony, the minimum salary being eroded and social programmes which have brought millions out of abject poverty to be forgotten in the name of reductions in public spending…  it is better to have a government which will be mother to the poor and father to the rich than another which treats the poor like a wicked step mother and the rich as babies in need of attention and care.

The October elections should confirm the perfecting of democracy, the valuing of citizenship and, above all, politics as a response to urgent social demands, such as improvements in education, health and public transport. A government which will dare to bring about agrarian reform, promote de-concentration of wealth and re-examination of the public debt. A government which will call for an Exclusive Constitutional amendment for political reform and stop the deforestation of Amazonia. A government which will open the Armed Forces’ archives of the dictatorship and reduce social inequality. Without this Brazil’s immediate future will immediately produce an increase in violence and poverty.

We have the makings of a happy new year for the majority of the Brazilian people in 2014. It will depend on our capacity to change the bad things which insist on enduring, to renew the unpopular which dare to repeat themselves and to support the good which means transformation.

*Frei Betto is a writer, author of “Calendário do Poder” (Calendar of Power) (Rocco).

www.freibetto.org twitter: @freibetto.

Copyright 2014 by Frei Betto – Without prior authorization, the reproduction of this article is forbidden by either electronic or printed means. You can subscribe to Frei Betto’s articles and receive them directly by e-mail. Contact: MHP – Literary Agents. (E-mail: mhgpal@gmail.com)

ABOUT FREI BETTO

He is a Brazilian Dominican with an international reputation as a liberation theologian.
Within Brazil he is equally famous as a writer, with over 56 books to his name.  In 1985 he won Brazil’s most important literary prize, the Jabuti, and was elected Intellectual of the Year by the members of the Brazilian Writers’ Union.

Frei Betto has always been active in Brazilian social movements, and has been an adviser to the Church’s ministry to workers in São Paulo’s industrial belt, to the Church base communities, and to the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST).

Diktator  General Ernesto Geisel(Operation Condor), deutschstämmig, in dessen Amtszeit der jüdische Journalist Herzog gefoltert und ermordet wurde –  und Willy Brandt, Ausriß. General Geisel war 1976 zu einem offiziellen Besuch in Großbritannien.

Kein Foto von Brandt und Geisel im Willy-Brandt Forum Unter den Linden, Berlin.

Wie die brasilianische Militärdiktatur Frauen folterte:  http://www.hart-brasilientexte.de/2013/03/26/brasiliens-komplizierte-vergangenheitsbewaltigung-maria-amelia-de-almeida-teles-grauenhaft-gefolterte-regimegnerin-heute-mitglied-der-wahrheitskommission-des-teilstaats-sao-paulo-zur-aufklarung-der/

Ausriß: Folterdiktator Ernesto Geisel und sein für die Operation Condor(länderübergreifende Jagd auf Regimegegner) zuständiger Geheimdienstchef Joao Figueiredo.

Amnesty International: Fortdauernde Folter und Todesschwadronen sind Diktaturerbe.