Publisher: Brazil: A democracy in the ICU?

The health of our democracy has never been the best, especially considering the disastrous consequences of our colonization process, which resulted in the formation of a predatory and insensitive slave elite, unable to develop the otherness necessary to understand the drama of those who occupy the bottom floor of the social pyramid. It is a simulacrum of democracy that works according to the preservation of the interests of Casa Grande, in consortium with international financial banking and the geopolitical interests of the great brother of the North. It is a "made-to-measure democracy", that is, whenever these elites have their interests contradicted, a coup is engendered. 

In recent years, some new ingredients have emerged to compose this scenario, such as the authoritarian arrangements articulated through the institutional instances of the so-called democratic framework, which has come to be called coups of a new type - without the executioners of democratic regimes needing to be expose or get their hands dirty - and also meet the legal conditions to criminalize those who express themselves in these terms on the subject. The gap between political democracy and economic or substantive democracy, in turn, as shown by numerous studies, is responsible for putting down the institutional edifice of democracy. It is the so-called last shovel of earth. Since the 1960s, French sociologist Claude Leffort has warned us: "A democracy that does not expand tends to die of starvation."

The conservative and right-wing "wave" that sweeps the world from one quadrant to another, although it has faced some ebbs in recent clashes, such as in Chile, for example, is still well built. Democracy thanks the Chilean people, who mostly rejected an authoritarian constitution and placed Elisa Lancon, a Mapuche Indian, in the presidency of the work that will formulate the country's new constitutional charter, which should be plural, citizen and, above all, preserve the values ​​of democracy in a country that has already faced bloody democratic setbacks.

We apologize to the readers and readers for the tautologies, but we still find it very difficult to understand how these insurgent political currents - of right - achieve the alchemy of reconciling, at first, excluding variables, such as, for example, uniting militias and neo-Pentecostalism in the same political project .There are indications about members of neo-Pentecostal churches involved even in drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro. Transgressions are possible at any institution. Strange, however, the recurrence. Some analyzes point to a dangerous geographical proximity to these "herds" - poor, black and slum dwellings in urban centers such as Rio de Janeiro - but it seems to us that political "motivation" is a more enlightening variable to clarify this phenomenon. of time, not infrequently, help us to understand certain political events. On this one in particular, it should not be different. There are good studies in progress on this issue and, whenever possible, we will bring them here.

The concrete fact is that we slept the political sleep that produced the monster. We failed to take care of our democracy and, today, we suffer from a setback of gigantic dimensions, with almost daily damage to our democratic institutions. And, as I said before, our pillars have always been very fragile. If the rope is kept taut, I think it will break. Initiatives taken by the STF in the sense of summoning the political actors representing the three powers to adjust the conversations are important and necessary, in order to contain the rapes and re-establish the limits of each one of them. Even more important, apply the rigors of the law to prevent anti-democratic demonstrations and preaching, such as fake news, true machines to destroy reputations.