Opinion Bolsonaro's quest to be Brazil's top gun endangers the whole country
By Mac Margolis and Robert Muggah
September 17, 2022 at 5:20 p.m. EDT
A customer at a gun shop in Sao Joao do Meriti, Brazil, wears a T-shirt with an image of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. (Bloomberg News via Getty Images)
Robert Muggah is co-founder of the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think tank. Mac Margolis, a Global Opinions contributing columnist, is the author of “Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”
Whether cocking finger pistols, vowing to put a rifle in every home or working to gut arms controls, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has spent his entire 33-year political career aspiring to be his country’s top gun.
“I want everyone armed,” he berated his cabinet in a 2020 meeting that turned into a viral video. Plagiarizing the National Rifle Association, he added that “a people armed will never be enslaved.”
This is not just political theater. Bolsonaro’s call to arms threatens Brazilian security, civic concord and perhaps democracy itself. The stakes are particularly high now, in the rancorous run-up to the Oct. 2 presidential elections, the most sharply contested since military rule ended 37 years ago. That Bolsonaro, a cashiered army captain who swoons for men in epaulets, takes every opportunity to extol his country’s 21-year military dictatorship only heightens the concerns.
Bolsonaro has militarized the government, packing his cabinet with more former and active brass than any leader since the dictators were in charge. He deployed troops, tanks and fighter planes to celebrate Brazil’s independence day, as if it were a martial victory. (It wasn’t.) By evangelizing assault rifles and handguns, he also seems bent on militarizing the future. This is grim news for a country that clocks more than 40,000 murders a year, most of them gun-related.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/17/bolsonaro-gun-policy-brazil-danger/
