Is a Silent Coup in Democratic Disguise Taking Place in Brazil?
Is a Silent Coup in Democratic Disguise Taking Place in Brazil?
by Ted Snider, April 02, 2016
After the first phase of overt military regime changes in Latin America, the 1954 CIA overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz ushered in the era of covert coups. The list is well known: Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile. Much less well known is the 1964 Kennedy administration coup that removed Brazil’s João Goulart from power. Noam Chomsky calls Goulart’s government “mildly social democratic.” Its replacement was a brutal military dictatorship.
Latin American coups are no longer commonly overt military actions or covert CIA actions. Since Obama came to power, coups, including Latin American coups, are silent coups. Unlike the earlier coups in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, these coups never take off their masks and reveal themselves as coups. They involve no tanks nor guns. They are coups that are silently disguised as domestic current events.
The new coups are cloaked in one of two disguises. In the first, the same minority who lost in the polls moves its message to the streets disguised as the voice of mass democratic expression; in the second, the minority executes its defeated desire in the disguise of the legal or constitutional workings of the legislature or the courts.
Brazil today is showing signs of both.
In 2002, the Workers’ Party’s (PT) Lula da Silva came to power with 61.3% of the vote. Four years later, he was returned to power with a still overwhelming 60.83%. In Brazil, a two term president must sit out a full term before running again. So, in 2010, Dilma Rousseff ran as Lula DA Silva’s chosen successor. She won a majority 56.05% of the vote. When, in 2014, Rousseff won re-election with 52% of the vote, the right wing opposition Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) went into panic.
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http://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2016/04/01/a-silent-coup-for-brazil/
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Why the hell can't they leave these countries alone. My heart breaks for them.
