The CIA's role behind why the Brazilian media normalized the far-right during that moment in history, and why all of the disinformation was propagated, has been made more apparent from just how close Bolsonaro's ties to the CIA have since been revealed to be. In March 2019, Bolsonaro paid a visit to the CIA headquarters, a move that former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim described as unprecedented: "No Brazilian president had ever paid a visit to the CIA, this is an explicitly submissive position. Nothing compares to this."
Of course, a materialist analysis of how Brazil got to this point must take into account all the country's internal risk factors for fascism in 2018, which didn't originate from the CIA or even from the U.S. itself. Brazil's descent into fascism was nurtured by its own capitalist crises. The Workers' Party, enamored with liberalism, refused to enact the social changes necessary to bring about socialism, instead taking a route of class reconciliation and bolstering the national bourgeois government with tax breaks and government loans. The ruling class repaid their kindness by taking them down in a parliamentary coup, and by coming to largely back the extreme right candidate due to his being a more reliable partner in enacting neoliberal policies.
Washington took advantage of this weakness within Brazil's bourgeois democracy to help bring a fascist to power. The country's media was willing to legitimize Bolsonaro not just because of the CIA's influence, but because of the dark direction that capitalism-and thus the capitalist media-had been going in. The country was undergoing a crisis in government corruption, a years-long economic crisis, and rising crime rates due to social inequality. To keep up profits, the country's capitalist class needed the radical solution of Bolsonaro's unchained neoliberalism, and the country's people came to largely desire a "law and order" candidate like him. So he was allowed to win with the help of a deliberately complicit media.
But the role of covert U.S. operations in electing Bolsonaro can't be disregarded. As the deadly consequences of last November's U.S.-orchestrated fascist coup in Bolivia become increasingly apparent to the world, let's also recognize that Brazil is experiencing the fallout from its own U.S. coup, one that took place a year before the one in Bolivia. This coup was only subtler and more dependent on the country's internal class contradictions.
The CIA hoped the world wouldn't notice or remember what it did in Brazil. But the more people suffer and die because of Bolsonaro's destructive regime, the more we should pay attention to the machinations of the CIA and of U.S. imperialism in general. They have a bigger hand in perpetuating global state violence than it might appear on the surface.
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