Happy Saturday, folks. I had intended not to type any words this weekend but there are rumors of a potential coup in Brazil circulating on social media and in the Italian press and I felt it prudent to check them out and share what we know so far.
Tl;dr: I don’t think there has been a coup, but I do think the Brazilian military is taking a more hands-on approach to managing day-to-day governance of the country during the COVID-19 crisis. For a country with a complicated history of the military intervening in politics like Brazil, that makes this an extremely important issue to follow going forward.
Here’s what we know:
An Argentina journalist named Horacio Verbitsky seems to be the source of the most sensationalist rumors. Verbitsky is critical of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in general and he has a spotty record of accuracy in the past -- he is perhaps best-known globally for a controversial book he wrote in 2005 about Jorge Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, called “El Silencio.” Apparently Verbitsky told El Destape Radio that he heard from an Argentine general that Bolsonaro was no longer Brazil’s effective president -- and that his Chief of Staff, a general named Walter Braga Netto, was now functioning as Brazil’s “operational president.”
From there, the story was picked up by a few different sources. La Repubblica, a well-respected Italian newspaper, reported on the rumors, and concluded that they were likely false without dismissing them outright. Various Brazilian media sources, like Revista Forum and Brasil247, also picked up on Verbitsky’s eye-popping statement.
I would have stood down there and kept to myself if not for one more report: a post on DefesaNet, a relatively reliable source of news and analysis on Brazilian defense and security issues. This post claims that Braga Netto has indeed “assumed a new role in politics,” but that he has done so with the approval of Bolsonaro and various Brazilian ministers and military commanders. It criticizes Brazilian media for reading the move as a military intervention and rejects the notion that the Brazilian military is at odds with the government as “delusional.” The DefesaNet report however also contains this line: “as long as the serious crisis [COVID-19] continues, the general [Braga Netto] will be the ‘operational president’ of Brazil.” It is also worth noting that DefesaNet’s official Twitter page retweeted a tweet which unreservedly rejected the idea that a coup had taken place and insisted that Braga Netto had merely taken on additional political functions.
All of this leads me to conclude provisionally that there has not been a coup in Brazil. Even so, it is obvious that dealing with COVID-19 has placed significant strain on the Brazilian government. It is also clear that President Bolsonaro’s controversial desire to prioritize the functioning of the Brazilian economy over and above some of the stricter COVID-19 mitigation and suppression strategies we have seen employed in almost every other country in the world has led Brazil’s military down a path of taking a more hands-on approach to crisis management and politics.
That is not necessarily unexpected -- Brazil’s military has selectively intervened in crises in recent years with the government’s blessing -- but it puts Brazil’s politics in a dangerous place. This is a country that has gone through its fair share of pain and suffering in figuring out what the appropriate relationship between its military and its civilian government should be, and COVID-19 may shape the evolution of that relationship profoundly depending on how the COVID-19 situation evolves in Brazil.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on this in the days and weeks ahead; in the meantime, back to drinking wine and watching Downtown Abbey with my wife. (It’s my first time watching and I’m not ashamed to say I’m hooked.)
—JLS