The legacy of the coup

Learn about the networks of vested interests and what made the 2016 coup one of the most despicable political maneuvers in Brazilian history, highlighting the mechanisms that allowed elites to manipulate the population for their own benefit.

Very few intellectuals and political commentators were as certain as Jessé Souza that President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment was the perfect front for a typical Brazilian coup. At that alarming moment in national politics, Jessé Souza fulfilled a difficult task: explaining how the "culture of coups," historically promoted by the elite against public policies aimed at the inclusion of the poorest—as happened with Getúlio Vargas and João Goulart—was fully operational without the public's awareness.

The 2016 coup revived the false moralism of the indignant middle class, which used the argument of "fighting corruption" to, in practice, maintain its privileges over the poorest and its exclusive position as the elite's front-line supporters. This indignation detached itself from the massive protests of 2013 to gain the representation, manipulated and inflated by the media, of the "popular will" that took to the streets in the pro-impeachment demonstrations years later. The immediate association of this discontent with the state's legal-police apparatus—which had the Operation Car Wash task force as its front man and Sergio Moro as a sort of anti-corruption superhero—devastated our young democracy and generated a reactionary and popular phenomenon never before seen in the history of Brazilian public life.

The legacy of the coup , therefore, is not the Michel Temer government, as one might initially believe. The legacy of the coup is Bolsonarism, a set of cognitive and emotional manipulations that exploit the fragility of people who do not understand the reasons for their poverty and humiliation. It is precisely this strategy of domination—the fruit of a racist, exclusionary, and authoritarian ideology—that Jessé Souza aims to dismantle in this book. It is an imperative contribution to understanding contemporary Brazil and its most pressing social challenges.