Brazil: AND Editorial – The Nation Must Vigorously Reject the Yankee Interference
We share hereby an unofficial translation of the latest Editorial published by A Nova Democracia (AND).
The economic sanctions of 50% on 45% of Brazilian exports, signed by executive order of the canine Donald Trump, are an economic attack unprecedented in recent history and pursue unacceptable objectives: to impose blackmail and, through it, intervene in national politics.
The justification presented by the wicked Yankee president for imposing such sanctions is pathetic, not to say stupid: he claims that Brazil implements policies that “harm American companies, the free speech rights of American citizens, [U.S.] foreign policy, and the American economy.” While highlighting the Yankees’ mistake of calling themselves “Americans”—part of their arrogant and abject mentality, in which they treat themselves as owners of the entire great continent—there are even worse ones. Now, if there’s one thing the Yankee imperialists can’t complain about, it’s being hampered by our country’s institutions: they dominate the national economy and drain our wealth, so laboriously produced by the brave Brazilian people, plunder our natural resources, subordinate agriculture to their demands through the agro-exporting latifundium of monoculture, and ensure that, for the vast majority of the Brazilian nation reigns, an anarchic order of poverty, unemployment, and hunger. Now, with the support of the bourgeois left led by the Workers’ Party (PT), which currently leads the country, Yankee imperialism is the largest direct capital investor in the country, controlling the central arteries of the economy with 30% of capital investment. Yankee investment funds, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and others, are major holders of Brazil’s main agricultural corporations, and through agriculture, they receive lavish perks from the successive governments in office, following the dictates of the IMF. The PT’s administration increased State investment by 335% between 2002 and 2016 during its first 14 years in office. The “economy” and “American companies,” who are machines for plundering the country’s wealth, were not hindered in any way from committing these crimes against the nation’s interests, against the dignity and sovereignty of the homeland, not even by the PT administrations, much less by Bolsonaro and the others. In fact, the attempts to impose prohibitive laws and tariffs aimed at limiting piracy in our country and the absurd transfer of profits to imperialist headquarters were precisely one of the reasons of the 1964 military coup, promoted by the U.S. State Department, through conspiracies by the Yankee embassy in Brazil and the CIA, along with major businessmen, landowners, their politicians, and the upper echelons of the lackey Armed Forces. Judging by the volume of wealth these corporations plunder our country, and by the suffering of our working people and the destruction of the country’s natural environment imposed by the semi-colonial domination of the United States, these Yankee monopoly corporations should have been confiscated and their property titles liquidated without any compensation, a long time ago.
The accusation that Yankee “citizens” have their freedom of expression curtailed is ridiculous: coming from Donald Trump and the dying “American democracy,” it’s intolerable. The “remarkable” Yankee democracy, cemented by five centuries of slavery, servitude, torture, and genocide of the Black population and now of Latino and other immigrants, gives its representatives no legitimacy to criticize even the most brutal autocracy in history, as it would share the same repugnant political and moral values. Therefore, the pestilent dog with the blond fringe and his co-religionists, who are the most ardent and explicit defenders of these unworthy values so present in the history and core of Yankee “democratic institutions,” should all shut up. For, if it is true that Brazil is far from being a democracy for the working masses, where basic fundamental guarantees are violable by any scoundrel, what can we say about the ancient Yankee “democratic” institutions, whitewashed tombs, yes, mired in a sea of blood belonging to the rest of the world’s peoples? Brazil’s problems must be resolutely resolved by the country’s popular masses and the Brazilian revolutionary movement that must lead them. And these historical and conscious subjects will do so, as an inexorable law of history, punishing their internal enemies, including Yankee imperialism as the main and greatest promoter of these violations. If Trump and his sick followers are concerned about freedom of expression, let them look at the pro-Palestine students who, on US soil, have been academically punished; detained and assaulted by the police and the National Guard; even threatened with having the marines; censored and even deported, in the case of those who are immigrants.
Bolsonaro, who in the Brazilian Army was known for being a terrible soldier with a lax discipline; Bolsonaro, who only yesterday was a recognized “eat and sleep” in the National Congress and has already spent 30 years of parliamentary vagrancy, and who spent four years being governed by the generals from inside the Planalto Palace; this same leech, now, is completely dependent on Donald Trump. He is even worse than the rabid Yankee animal, even more unworthy and repugnant, for being the type who would sell even his soul to avoid having to pay the price for his choices. Stupid, Bolsonaro tries to make his entourage believe that Trump and imperialism are sanctioning Brazil in its defense, and seeks to prolong the crisis so that one thing leads to another; he will fall from the donkey he rides, because sooner than he thinks, the Yankees will get what they want and leave him in the dust. that he and his entourage do not be fooled by the nonsense of the buffoon president, because, fundamentally, they do not deviate even a millimeter from the Yankee “global geopolitical strategy” issued by the real power that wields through the Pentagon).
Far from saving Bolsonaro, the Yankees want to impose certain interests, such as exclusive access to certain natural resources, such as “rare earths,” strategic metals for the current industrial production of cutting-edge technology and for the “arms race” against the Russians and Chinese (incidentally, it is noted that some of these metals are already in the hands of Yankee companies, as in the case of niobium, and Chinese and German companies, in the case of lithium, shattering the Lulaist bravado that “no one is laying a finger” on them); and they seek to pressure the current government to abandon the temptation to fall into the orbit and sphere of influence of Russian and Chinese imperialists in the realm of any “international relations.” The Bolsonaros applaud the foreign framework of national sovereignty; it’s that simple. Even the sanctions against Alexandre de Moraes and the offensive against the Supreme Federal Court, rather than seeking to save Bolsonaro, seek to send a clear message to the Supreme Court: don’t harm Big Tech with regulations and penalties based on content. Bolsonaro’s defense is merely an ideological motive, to justify and gain support from public opinion, including from criminals, opportunists of all kinds and those who are deluded and searching for any real change in Brazil, however impossible, through military coups or electoral farce.
The current government is already calculating, behind the scenes, what it will sell to free itself from sanctions, and in doing so, it will further hand our country over to the devastating wrath of imperialism, especially Yankee imperialism. Reactionary institutions, sustained by imperialism’s economic exploitation, cannot be expected to be anti-imperialist, even if they are besieged by it, and even if they know that our territory will be the target of imperialist military aggression in the future, due to its wealth and the level of control these imperialists already seek to exert in the political and economic spheres, for example, in the Amazon. The public interventions of the head of state, the heads of parliament, and the Supreme Court justices all reaffirm national sovereignty, not to exercise it to free the nation from the semi-colonial shackles that hinder its progress and oppress our people for centuries, and to build it as a true democratic, free, and sovereign republic, but rather to be able to sell it at a higher price to the very same entity that attacked it. After all, this is what the local ruling classes and their vanguard representatives have been doing for the past 203 years since Independence. Now, these same traitors to the nation, who spit the words “sovereignty” and “independence” from the rooftops, under pressure from a vile Yankee, will voluntarily surrender a little more of our already fragile national sovereignty, arguing that this is important to avoid further loss, when both are unacceptable.
It is noteworthy that, while a foreign superpower constrains and seeks to humiliate the Brazilian nation, the military brass not only remains silent but cooperates with the enemy army. Now, although it is an impossible speculation, what would happen if the reactionary Brazilian Army had among its ranks and command personnel as truly dedicated to the patriotic cause as its leadership is to the coup cause! In the latter, Generals Villas-Bôas, Walter Braga Netto, Augusto Heleno, and others demonstrated an ostentatious and selfless initiative, a formidable commitment, issuing dozens of threatening statements to “Brazilian institutions”—the judiciary directly and the legislature indirectly—and warning that they would enter the political fray to “make things happen” if Brazil did not comply with their military intervention plans. Some of them even went so far as to prepare for a rupture. Although this is an impossible theoretical exercise, perhaps they would be just as brave with the Yankee intervenors. But rather, they prefer to flatter them, posing as dogs A poodle in front of its owner, sometimes wagging its tail, sometimes tucking it between its legs, or like guard dogs defending them from popular rebellion. Despite developing all national defense based on technologies under imperialist control, the greatest representation of this patriotic farce is that, while everyone admits Yankee interference and the future risk of damage to our homeland from invasions by foreign powers, the high command of the Armed Forces delights in “Joint Exercises” with Yankee troops in key biomes of our geography such as the Amazon and the Caatinga, delivering strategic and sensitive information to the insatiable greed of the most aggressive hordes of nations, the most oppressive of peoples, and the most bloodthirsty in all of universal history! Nothing different can be expected from these “heroes.”
This is how the Brazilian nation, our homeland, continues and will continue as long as it remains in the hands of the landowners, the bureaucratic and comprador bourgeoisie, and these institutions founded on the country’s submission to foreign powers. Only the New Democratic Revolution, the popular masses of workers, honest intellectuals, small and medium-sized landowners, and, most importantly, the struggle of poor peasants for land will put an end to the 525 years of genocide of the poor, Black, and Indigenous people in these lands, and centuries of national humiliation.