We publish as unofficial translation of the editorial of A Nova Democracia newpaper issue 216

Editorial - Militarization of the elections reflects the deep crisis

The growing military intervention in national life that is trampling on the decisions of the old Brazilian State institutions - such as the use of federal troops to suppress popular protests in Brasilia, and thus the threat and coercion of the Supreme Federal Court exercised by General Villas-Bôas, the commander of the Army, when the habeas corpus for Luiz Inácio was being voted; the enactment of the “Law and Order Guarantee” to intimidate the truckers and the popular masses who supported their national strike, as well as intervention in Rio de Janeiro to massacre the poor in the favelas under the pretext of combating "organized crime" - extended even to the fake electoral process. This was done by the same Army commander who "invited" the presidential candidates to a questioning. These are facts that, by themselves, have exposed the cackles about the "Democratic State of Right" of the defenders of this old order, uncover the landlord/bourgeois and semicolonial/semi-feudal class nature of the old Brazilian state and shows the complete bankruptcy of its oligarchic and corrupt political system.

And in order to leave the escalation of military intervention wide open, the same general, during an interview to an organ of the monopoly of communication, affirms that the result of the elections can be questioned in its legitimacy. It should be emphasized here that in this case the term "legitimacy" clearly assumes the class character above referred to. But it still sound like a joke, since from the deceit of the "Cruzado Plan" (when the country had hardly returned to civil government) the electoral process has been impacted by increasing abstention, null and white votes of the population who is disappointed and discredited with successive governments , already occupied by almost all the main fractions of the Single Party - which are nothing more than mere shift management to serve the interests of imperialism, principally Yankee and their lackeys of the big bourgeoisie and landlords. In the grave political and moral crisis in which the country sinks, more than ever, the electoral sham lacks any legitimacy, let alone express the will of the Brazilian people.

This lack of legitimacy stems directly from the fact that elections are carried out on the basis of corruption and the big money expended by foreign corporations, principally Yankees, by local banks and contractors. In addition to this there is the fact that the electoral bases of most of the country are dominated by secular oligarchies of slaver, semi-feudal and semicolonial origin.

It is clear that in such a Single Party election like this, the fact that a high commander of the Armed Forces raises the question of its outcome is a clear demonstration of the crisis of domination of the exploiting classes, whose fractions and corresponding power groups are engaged in a deadly fight for the leading post of the old and rotten Brazilian State.

For no other reason, the high command of the Armed Forces set actions in motion, under the rhetoric of the preservation of "democratic institutions", to create public opinion for its intervention under constitutional cover, since it would be incumbent upon the Armed Forces to defend the "internal order "- that is, the maintenance of the corrupt and rotten institutions of this old state, of the great bourgeois and landlords, lackeys of imperialism, principally Yankee.

As it turns out, the irrefutable explosive situation of growing discontent and revolt of the popular masses in the countryside and in the city, with this entire rotten situation, makes impossible the peaceful restoration of the old order. This is proven by the uprisings that have occurred since 2013, in which the masses have already sent word that they no longer accept the oppression and plunder they have lived up to now. In fact, the discourse of the general is the distortion of the preventive counterrevolutionary military coup d’état to the inevitable general uprising of the Brazilian people.

Using the military intervention in Rio de Janeiro as a laboratory, in which they intensified the reactionary civil war against the poor and black people, they could measure the pulse of the masses. From what we have seen, they concluded that they should increase the lethality of the intervention by increasing the murders of the people in the favelas - a population that has been, in the past, suppressed from basic rights, minimally decent employment and income, minimally decent public services, education, health, security, while it is extorted by the endless dictatorship of taxes.

Such action, as indeed happened, only diminished the abstract, virtual, and highly publicized prestige of the Armed Forces among the population, as recent research on the crisis in Rio de Janeiro has shown. They also indicated a drop in the rate of acceptance of military intervention.

Among the laws of the history of class society there is an imperishable axiom: where there is oppression, there is resistance. Therefore, increasing violence against the poor will only increase their indignation and their willingness to find ways to oppose and put an end to oppression.

Therefore, it is not for the Armed Forces of the rotten Brazilian State to stand on the legitimacy of the rotten electoral process. This right is of the people that increasingly rejects both and echoes the slogan of Neither election nor military intervention! Revolution, Now!