Bolsonaro, the arsonist, is more dangerous than the Amazon fire

Global media, leaders and celebrities have expressed concern on the burning of the Amazon these days. Brazilian President Bolsonaro has responded to these concerns with his characteristic  casual and crude reaction. He has shocked the world with his typically vulgar comments on French President Macron’s wife. 

Brazilian ranchers have always tried to illegally gain more land for agriculture and cattle and resort to burning of forests during dry season. The previous governments had kept this under check to some extent. But Bolsonaro reduced the powers of the authorities for environment, forests and indigenous people and loosened the regulations. This has given the green signal to the ranchers to act with more impunity and fueled the Amazon fires. 

Bolsonaro is a climate denier and blind follower of his role model Trump on this and many other issues. His mindset is too petty to understand or care about the larger interests of Brazil and those of the world. His foreign minister Ernesto Araujo, a pseudo intellectual, has called climate change as a “ cultural Marxist plot”. He claims that climate science is merely  a dogma which has been used to justify increasing the regulatory power of states over the economy and the power of international institutions on the nation states and their populations.

The only thing Bolsonaro understands is what the illegal ranchers tell him in his own crude language. Amazon is ours and we can do what we like. Bolsonaro is against the reservation of land for indigenous communities and protection given to them. In a meeting he held with the governors of Amazonian provinces this week, he did not talk about any strategy to put out the fire. He asked why is 14% of Brazil’s land reserved for the indigenous communities? He probably feels that it was a historical mistake not to have completely eliminated the indigenous tribes. But he was forthright on the issue of killing of leftists by the military dictatorship. He said, “ we should have killed more of them”. Recently when the president of the Bar Council of Brazil criticized some policies of the government, Bolsonaro said,” Do you want to know how your father was killed. Ask me. I know”. The father of the Bar Council President was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the dictatorship. 

   

Bolsonaro is incapable of understanding the larger implications of his irresponsible policies and statements for the country. The Brazilian agricultural product exporters are worried by the negative image and potential adverse consequences being created by Bolsonaro’s foolishness. The Agriculture Minister is trying her best to put out the fires caused by Bolsonaro and is going around Europe giving assurances.

Brazil, one of the top agroexporters in the world, is dependent on exports for revenue. China is the largest market for Brazilian agro exports. But Bolsonaro visited Taiwan during his election campaign to show off his anti-Chinese bravery. He did not care about the fact that China is the largest market accounting for 63 billion dollars of Brazilian global exports. This is more than double of the exports of 29 billion dollars to USA.  Later, the vice president of the country had to go to Beijing to put out the fire damage caused by Bolsonaro. 

It may be noted here that Brazil already has enough agricultural land to feed not only the 210 million Brazilians but another five hundred million outsiders. So there is no need to produce more food or seek more land for agriculture. 

Brazil is the largest soybean producer in the world with 123 millions harvested last year. But the Brazilians do not eat the soy beans, despite the fact that it is the lowest cost ( per acre) protein. They export it exclusively to China, the only country which benefits from more Brazilian soy production. In 2018, Brazil exported 33 billion dollars of soybean and 13 billion dollars of meat. 

Bolsonaro is now setting fire to Mercosur, the regional group. He has already started viciously attacking Cristina Fernandez and her Peronist  candidate who are expected to come back to power beating the centre-right Macri in the October 2019 elections. This will likely kill Mercosur, which was established by the visionary leaders of South America in the nineties.

Sensible Brazilians are ashamed and see Bolsonaro as an aberration and curse put in the presidential palace after the judicial and legislative coups in which President Dilma was impeached and Lula was put in jail to prevent his contesting the elections. They perceive him as an insult to Brazilian intelligence, decency and culture. They see him as unprepared, unfit and and unwilling to learn to govern the great country with his small mind. In his inaugural speech, he vowed to liberate Brazil from socialism and political correctness. His anti-affirmative action and racist views are a set back for the large poor and marginalised black population of over 80 million out of the total of 210 million. He told a fellow Congress woman that he would not rape her since she was too ugly.

Bolsonaro’s foreign minister is even more obscurantist and anachronistic. Araújo states that his goal is to “help Brazil and the world liberate themselves from globalist ideology”, which he sees as “anti-Christian and anti-human beings”. He claims that the ultimate aim of globalization is to break the link between God and man. He quotes Biblical texts extensively to support his divine views including about Brazil’s place in the Western world in international affairs. Araujo believes that theophobia is a bigger problem than xenophobia.

Bolsonaro’s reaction to the European concerns on Amazon has put in jeopardy the Mercosur-European Union Free Trade Agreement concluded recently after twenty years of negotiations. President Macron has threatened to block its ratification unless Brazil accepts responsibility for climate change. 

The Amazon fire is limited only to the jungle area. But the Bolsonaro fire is destroying the fabric of the country and its essence. 

The forest fire can be put out in a few weeks. But the damage being caused by Bolsonaro to Brazil is going to hurt the country more profoundly.

Given his incendiary provocations, destructive attitude, capacity and track record in harming the internal strength and external relations and image of Brazil, one should expect only more fires in the coming years from Bolsonaro. 

Brazil and the world should be more worried by Bolsonaro the arsonist than the physical fire raging in Amazon. 

Sandra Torres, the Hillary and Evita of Guatemala, defeated again in the Presidential elections

Alejandro Giammattei has been elected as the president of Guatemala in the second round of elections held on 11 August.

Giammettei’s victory is seen more as a defeat of Sandra Torres, the other candidate who lost the elections getting 42% votes as against 58% of the winner. She was perceived as the Hillary Clinton of Guatemala. Sandra was the wife of Alvaro Colom when he was President in the period 2008-12. She manipulated and intervened in the administration to raise her profile and image. She was seen as the real power in the presidential palace. Colom was arrested on corruption charges in 2018. Hatred for Sandra  made more people to vote for her opponent.  .

When her husband was president,  Sandra acted like Evita of Argentina. She became head of a charity organization and got plenty of government funds to distribute to poor people, as Evita did. Sandra wanted to be seen as protector of the poor with her leftist agenda.

But there was a constituitional obstacle to Sandra’s dream to become President after her husband. The Guatemalan constituition prohibits immediate family members of sitting president from contesting presidential elections. So what did Sandra do? She tried Magical Realism. She divorced her husband a few months before the election and proclaimed that she was “ the first woman to divorce husband to marry the country”. Hmm..she was already divorced before marrying Colom for whom she became the third wife.

But some judges in the constituitional court had the courage to reject her claim saying that her candidature was a violation of the spirit of the constituition even if she was technically correct. This reminds one of a Guatemalan joke. When a macho was accused of ‘sleeping with many women”, he objected saying that he “slept only with his wife but was awake with other women”. 

After the disqualification of her candidature in 2011, Sandra waited four years and contested against Jimmy Morales in 2015. She was beaten by the comedian Morales. She tried again in 2019 and got 25% votes as against 13% of Giammattei in the first round. But in the second round, she was defeated. 

Giammattei, a conservative, had contested the presidential elections three times earlier. He is part of the traditional Guatemalan oligarchy and military elite.

The new president who will take over in January has the reputation of a strong man. He had faced charges of extra judicial killings when he was the chief of prisons. He might now realise that it was easier to deal with the violent criminal gangs of Guatemala. In the future he has to face a more cruel and crude external white nationalist gang leader in US. Trump had forced the current Guatemalan president Morales to sign an agreement to halt the Central American asylum seekers in Guatemala pending processing of asylum claims. Morales wanted to please Trump administration since he was facing corruption accusation and other domestic challenges. But Giammattei has expressed reservations about the capacity of Guatemala to take on the larger responsibility of giving asylum to seekers from other Central American countries.

Guatemala faces many fundamental challenges such as mass poverty, corruption, crime and violence. The country suffered more during the civil war and the crack down on leftists by the right wing military dictatorship in the eighties when hundreds of thousands of people got killed. Most of the poor are the indigenous communities which form over fifty percent of the total population of  17 million.

Guatemala was the first country in Latin America to be destabilized by US in the so called war against Communism after the second world war. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected leftist president Jacobo Arbanz and installed a military dictatorship. While the coup was carried out in the name of the war on Communism, the real reason was to protect the United Fruit Company which owned  hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land. The company was likely to lose some land to the land reforms initiated by Arbanz government. It had absolute monopoly in banana plantation and trade and pursued exploitative labour policies with impunity. Its revenue was bigger than that of the government of Guatemala. John Foster Dulles, the CIA chief, had close business ties with the company. When the rightist military dictatorship was resisted by the leftist political movements, the regime unleashed a wave of terror, with the support and encouragement of US. The civil war continued till 1996 in which over two hundred thousand people were killed. In March 1999, President Clinton made a formal apology for the sufferings inflicted on the people of Guatemala by the US-backed military dictatorship. But those who got US weapons to fight communism took to gangsterism and criminality after the end of the civil war. To escape this US-supported violence and crime, Guatemalans started emigrating to US, which has a moral responsibility to give asylum to the victims of its past sins.

It was in Guatemala that Che Guevara got to see first hand the excesses of the empire and became an anti-imperial leftist guerrilla crusader. Thereafter he joined Fidel Castro and succeeded in liberating Cuba from another military dictatorship supported by US.

Guatemala is the largest country and market in Central America. It is famous for Coffee and Cardamom exports.

India’s exports to Guatemala have been increasing steadily reaching 305 million dollars in 2018-19. 

The small Guatemala has beaten the big India to become the largest exporter of Cardamom. While India has been a cardamom exporter for several hundred years, Guatemala started production after the first world war when a German coffee planter brought the Indian seeds to Guatemala. The Guatemalans export almost all their cardamom production since the local consumption is insignificant, unlike India which consumes a major part of the production.

India, the land of many political dynasties, could learn from the young Guatemalan democracy.  Article 186 of the Guatemalan constitution prohibits the President's relatives ' within four degrees of consanguinity and second degree in-laws' from contesting for Presidential post immediately after his or her term. The Indian democracy would certainly become more inclusive and better if the constitution is amended to include this article.