WAR BETWEEN GOOD CITIZENS AN BAD CITIZENS: TOOLS FOR TODAY'S TOTALITARIANISM IN BRAZIL AND THE PHILIPPINES

On May 6, 2021, on the heels of Brazil’s deadliest month since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, special police forces in Rio de Janeiro killed 28 people in the urban community of Jacarezinho. It was the deadliest single police operation in the city’s history – quite a feat considering the long history of militarized policing and violent encounters between state security forces and criminal groups. The political implications of the operation are difficult to ignore. The day before the operation, President Jair Bolsonaro met with the newly-installed Rio governor and ally, Cláudio Castro. The month of April had been devastating for Bolsonaro. A wave of high approval ratings had fizzled out amidst a combination of dwindling Covid social assistance payments and increasing inflation. Record Covid deaths, hospital overcrowding, the emergence of a new Covid variant in the state of Manaus, and overall federal government denialism and mismanagement of the crisis led critics to label Bolsonaro a perpetrator of genocide. The label appeared to be sticking. Like other authoritarian populist presidents, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte in particular, Bolsonaro has defined himself as the security president. He strives to personify the “strict father” that protects the people from a pervasive national threat, even if this means extreme action and violating democratic norms. Yet, he was an utter failure at protecting people from Covid.

 

We do not know if Bolsonaro and Castro discussed, or if Bolsonaro incentivized, the operation. Nevertheless, the operation played, at least in the short term, to Bolsonaro’s favor. The indignation over Covid took a temporary backseat in public debate while one of the starkest ideological schisms in Brazil grabbed attention: the schism between those who see the police as soldiers in a war protecting “good citizens” against the incredibly dangerous and ever-present threat of the “bandido”, and those who see the police as a largely corrupt institution that is overly excited to kill poor, overwhelmingly black, male slum-residents, with little regard for whether those residents are actually involved in crime.

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"Bolsonaro and Duterte have focused especially on the poor, male urban slum resident, building on a class, and in Brazil, racial narrative that equates him with immorality, indolence, and crime."

 

The narrative power of this contrived “war” between good and bad citizens helped propel Bolsonaro to power. His image as the ultra-macho commander of security forces “cleansing” a Brazil in a crisis of “immorality” and “threats” is exactly what he would want to replace the headlines dominated by Covid. Similarly, the bedrock of Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s political image has been a violent “war” on suspected drug users and sellers. This so-called war has also been his most consistent policy measure, in terms of both rhetoric and implementation. Those suspected of using or selling drugs are calculatingly depicted as immoral threats who will inevitably destroy the country if they are not eliminated. According to Duterte, the drug problem is the immediate existential crisis faced by the Philippines. Since he took office in 2016, an estimated 30,000 overwhelmingly poor, male urban slum residents have been killed in police and police-supported operations. Despite the majority of the population conceding that they do not believe the police only kill in self-defense (as the government claims), the so-called war against drugs remains highly popular.

 

A defining characteristic of the populist style is to identify and otherize a group in society, constructing a distinction between “the legitimate people” and “the enemy.” While the literature on populism has focused on defining the “elite” as the enemy, Bolsonaro and Duterte (as well as others in their authoritarian-leaning clan such as Trump, Modi, and Erdogan) have also conspicuously targeted and dehumanized groups that have been historically marginalized and abused by the state, thus taking advantage of already-existing stigmatization and hate. Bolsonaro and Duterte have focused especially on the poor, male urban slum resident, building on a class, and in Brazil, racial narrative that equates him with immorality, indolence, and crime. Urban slum residents are central to the economic lifeblood of Philippine and Brazilian cities. The middle and upper classes need their labor but must keep their humanity at a distance lest they socially ascend and displace the middle and upper classes’ from their exclusive privilege. (Or, perhaps, the middle and upper classes begin to feel guilty about their exploitation and the squalid conditions in which they live.) State security forces are already experts at targeting these residents, especially the male residents who are more easily portrayed as dangerous predators that must be subdued by force. Specialized militarized police units were deployed to urban slum areas during both countries’ dictatorships. Later, the international “War on Drugs” provided ready-made packages of funding, security training, and media talking points to convince the population that urban slums are synonymous with drug traffic and criminality.