Destruction and setback: the policies of the Bolsonaro government

By Camila De Mario / Latin America21

This will be a decisive year for Brazil. Integrating a super electoral cycle of great changes in Latin America, the country will decide in October whether to give Jair Bolsonaro another mandate or follow the example of its neighbors and take a new ideological turn away from the extreme right. If it opts for the second option, Brazil will still have many challenges to face, the main one, perhaps, that of recovering from three years of a government policy guided by destruction and retrogression.

Jair Bolsonaro was elected with a central promise: to destroy. The agenda was to destroy the legacy of the Brazilian “left”. His speeches focused on the attacks on the achievements of identity movements and minorities, as well as on the rights and social policies erected after the 1988 Constitution. Make no mistake, in this legacy to be destroyed are the political and social achievements of the New Republic, it is this pact that is at risk.

The effects of the destruction are everywhere: in the demographic census that was not carried out; in the data on the pandemic that had to be disclosed by a press consortium; in the absence of transparency in public acts; in insufficient data for monitoring the production of public policies. Finally, in the recent data blackout on the Covid-19 pandemic, which left us adrift just as the country was being devastated by the Omicron variant.

Cuts and dismantling in Science and Education

Destruction operates in different ways. Through budget cuts in various areas, the discontinuity of programs and public policies. Secretariats, departments, demobilized sectors, closed. Science and technology, for example, suffer from the paralysis of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Level Personnel (Capes); The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) is agonizing over the systematic cutback of funds and research scholarships at various levels of training and areas of knowledge.

The Anísio Teixeira National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (Inep) and the National High School Examination (ENEM), attacked frontally, suffer from dismissals without clear criteria, dismissal of directors, accusations of cases of moral harassment, work overload , beyond the ideological questions about the quality of the work of its technicians, responsible for the preparation and implementation of the ENEM.

How can we forget the recent fire in the Pantanal and the omission and lack of support from the federal government to combat it? The burned and deforested areas had a record increase throughout the country since 2019, and the government’s response translated into speeches with empty and manipulative rhetoric, added to the cut of funds in the Ministry of the Environment, and in the inspection and control organisms. in this matter.

Similar effects, and more serious, are the delay in making fundamental and urgent decisions. The pandemic provides us with many examples. Demands for inputs, such as oxygen in Manaus, whose urgency was ignored; vaccines for Covid-19 purchased with an unjustified delay, a practice that was reproduced with childhood vaccination. We pay with the lives of thousands of Brazilians.

setbacks in health

But the dismantling of public policies does not only consist of cuts, paralysis and delays. Let us remember the National Mental Health Policy (PNSM) implemented in 2001, and the National Drug Policy (PND) of 2006. The current government has made fundamental changes in both, directly attacking the principles and achievements of the Psychiatric Reform. The objectives are the deinstitutionalization of mental health care and the practice of harm reduction for the treatment of drug users.

The mental health model that was in force until the beginning of the Bolsonaro government was guided by the recognition that people with mental disorders and drug users are political subjects, bearers of rights, and must be treated in their own social environment. Above all, the PNSM recognized the right of people to make decisions about their own lives and treatment.

Technical Note 11/2019 published by the Ministry of Health brought changes that now allow the operation of private services such as Psychiatric Hospitals and Therapeutic Communities. It also brought the possibility of mandatory internment and the defense of abstinence as a way to prevent and combat drug use. The result was the increase in Therapeutic Communities as of 2019. In 2018 the Federal Government financed about 2.9 thousand vacancies in these institutions, and in 2019 the Ministry of Citizenship financed 11 thousand vacancies.

The latest setback in health matters has been the proposal, without scientific support, to include electroconvulsive therapy for the containment of aggressive behavior in cases of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the Clinical Protocol and Therapeutic Guidelines. This practice is considered torture by the UN. The resistance of the other established powers, politicians, part of the media and civil society, seems to have blocked the action.

The urgent task of reversing all Bolsonaro’s policies

It is impossible to list all the changes and their consequences in this article. They are present in all public policies. In 2022, we have the urgent task of trying to know and understand the meaning of each one of them, of scrutinizing each decree, each technical note, each budget cut, each program suspended and replaced, or not. The task is gigantic.

The next president will have to do much more than contain the advance of authoritarianism and the institutional destruction promoted by Bolsonarism. Getting rid of the Expenditure Ceiling and stopping its dismantling will not rebuild our institutions, our public policies, it will not recover our democracy, our pact, our dignity.

If Brazilian society is not aware of the size and meaning of the dismantling promoted during the Bolsonaro government, we will not even be able to sweep up the rubble. (OR)

Sociologist and professor of the Postgraduate Program in Political Sociology of the Rio de Janeiro University Research Institute of the Cândido Mendes University (IUPERJ / UCAM). Doctor in Social Sciences from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP).