Editorial: Between coups and pitanga liqueurs

The blogosphere thus has some curious things. Until very recently we have published some comments on a new book by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In fact, a volume of his memoirs of the two mandates in which he occupied the Presidency of the Republic. Our comments related to an alleged attempted coup against former President Itamar Franco, of whom Fernando Henrique was Finance Minister. At the time, FHC was implementing the Real Plan, fundamental for ordering the country's economy. According to FHC, after that scandal carried out by the model Lilian Ramos - who posed with Itamar without the intimate pieces - an emissary of the quarters would have sought to make them the following proposal: if he accepted to be the Minister of Finance, The military commanders would be willing to dismiss the miner from power.

If this version presented in the book by Fernando Henrique Cardoso is true, we are facing another important element to analyze the so-called coup of the XXI century, since the military did not want to directly assume power, but to find a civil option that could do it, It. The problem is that the civilian options on the horizon did not appeal to the barracks. None of the three names in the line of succession was to the liking of the military. The Federal Deputy from Pernambuco, Inocêncio Oliveira presided over the Chamber of Deputies. Senator Humberto Lucena was the president of the Federal Senate. The president of the STF at the time, was considered by the military like a man pulseless, crippled. Without credible options, the military backed down, but they demanded the head of the then Minister of Justice, Maurício Correia, whose behavior had also been disapproved by the military. Moreira would have exaggerated the intake of alcohol during the same event in which former president Itamar Franco participated. Even with an honorable exit, Moreira was removed from office.

The Brazilian elite never had the slightest respect for our democratic process. The episode above only highlights the fragility of our democracy. From the schematic point of view - only schematic - for the scholars of the subject, it is also the lesson that, even in those days, coup d'état solutions were considered, not as traditional as those that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s on the continent. That deserves a nod to the work we've written on the scams of the 21st century. The barracks are always on the alert and, unfortunately, this alert is not only about their dedicated mission to defend the homeland. Until recently it was reported that a group of human rights defenders, who were in Uruguay, on a trial of military men who acted in the country's dictatorship, received a death threat from an ultra-right group that was still a member of Operation Condor , A military alliance that congregated the operations of the Southern Cone dictatorships, responsible for dozens of assassinations of opponents in past decades.

But the most surprising is not that. Yesterday we had a flood of access to one of our posts. This post was recalled during the editorial we dealt with on this subject, notably by invoking military guidelines on acceptable and reprehensible behavior. The Military Dictatorship of 1964 established a harmonious relation with the intellectual from Pernambuco Gilberto Freyre, who assumed the support to the military government, in a very delicate time, where to assume right positions indicated a possible public execration. Not so much today. The photo of the journalist and ex-guerrilla Fernando Gabeira alongside the leaders of the MBL, published above, is emblematic of what we are affirming. The right no longer hides in the closets. They are everywhere, in the media, in blogs, in social networks. Last Sunday, the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo brought an infographic about the performance of these people in various media. Verbal dysenteries and moral decrepitations, in these pointed times, became recurrent.

Some say that the sociologist Gilberto Freyre lived a kind of ideological seesaw, now assuming progressive positions, now assuming conservative positions. To some extent, we might even share this opinion when you are at stake, for example some of your productions. From the political point of view, however, I do not see how we can do any weighted average here. Gilberto brings a conservative DNA from the earliest days of his youth. Its attachment to the New Left or even its struggle against the Estado Novo here in Recife are no more than episodes driven by other interests, which are far from being linked to any remnant that is of some democratic conviction. As I have stated at other times, the struggle against the Estado Novo was nothing more than a struggle between oligarchies. The sugar cane, to which Gilberto was organically bound, and the cattle rancher and cotton company, who produced the Gordian shoot, Agamenon Magalhães.

Some people asked us for the book that Gilberto Freyre wrote about land reform, at the request of Marco Maciel, to meet a military demand. We already sent them. I believe there is someone among the applicants who would like to go into the subject, which would be a good idea. The famous pitanga liqueurs arose in that context to illustrate how opponents of the racial democracy thesis did not resist their irresistible taste when they were still prepared by the master of Apipucos. There are other stories involving these liqueurs, which the reader may find in that specific text on the subject. I do not know if Marshal Castelo Branco tried it, but it was a fact that both were in the early hours of the morning in the famous Solar de Apipucos. At the time, Castelo Branco, the first president of the Military Junta, was the Commander of the IV Army, located here in Recife. This is just before 1964, which helps us to conclude that Gilberto Freyre's decision to support them was nothing out of date.