This is part of the online version of Jamil Chad’s newsletter sent yesterday (10th). In the full newsletter, for subscribers only, the columnist also reported that the UN was giving the maximum warning signal and was concerned that the Brazilian government remained silent on the political violence with the deaths that marked the 2022 election campaign. in your email next week with the main column and more information? Click here.
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Dear Minister Rosa Weber,
Next Monday, the 12th, you are assuming the presidency of the Federal Supreme Court, filled with critical moments in one of the most critical moments in our history. Under the attacks of the Executive, the Judiciary will undoubtedly be a key piece in the definition of our future.
This time I am not writing my letters from distant and quiet Geneva. I landed in São Paulo this week and was faced with a destined society tormented by a question that had puzzled me for a long time. After all, will it come tomorrow or is it now?
I think this question first came to me when I was on a street in Cairo that had access to Tahrir Square.
In those days, the capital of Egypt was the scene of a bloody conflict with men riding camels, whips in their hands, warplanes flying over our heads and the smell of death. Largely US-funded resistance against one of the strongest military governments in the region did not even maintain a primitive arsenal.
Egyptian society had spent decades under the strict control of an army that guaranteed a de facto monopoly over the use and possession of weapons. But I realized that they were searching for the meaning of the word “tomorrow” in an alley.
A group of men and boys had built a catapult and proudly used it to defend the new boundary between freedom and dictatorship against the dictator’s armored tanks and soldiers.
It was an unequal war. One side thought it was in the 21st century. The other fought for the coming of the 21st century with medieval weapons and delusions of freedom.
But when my surprise at that scene gave way to understanding, I realized that the gun was made from an overturned lamppost and a supermarket fruit basket at one end.
The mechanism threw pieces of cobblestone that had been plucked from the streets by these people’s fingernails. Vitruvius had never conceived this piece of utopia with such hope. There they fought for democracy. On that street, tomorrow was not the future. It was available.
Confident that I come from a consolidated democracy and that this is a struggle of our past, I observed and wrote of these actions with unforgivable arrogance.
How could I have imagined, ten years later, that we would reach our arms to defend what we thought was on our birth certificates? In those days in Cairo, the idea that our democracy would be put at risk might have seemed as absurd as the idea that a defender of military dictatorship and torturers would one day be elected president.
Now I know that we have our Tahrir Square in every tree that fell silently in a forest, in every couple who silently put down their hand to avoid violence in the street, in every writer who silently sought other less polemical words in his text. Protect your family’s income.
This year, I have been the target of death threats from the very groups that our loving relatives helped rise to power. When I confronted some of them with this information, what I did was invite them to arouse love, not embarrass them. I tried to bring to our home, to our table, what our decisions mean. But here in Brazil, as I unpack, I ask myself the same question again. Will it come tomorrow or is it now?
Minister,
You are taking over the STF at a time when we discover that nothing is inevitable. Social progress is being undone and the democratic journey is suffocated in a basement hidden in an ordinance in the Official Gazette. I’m not the one saying this. V-Dem, one of the main European institutions in Sweden, says that between 2020 and 2022 we are 30 years behind in democratic progress in the world. Today, only 13% of the world’s population is privileged to fully enjoy the dream of democracy. A minority.
Democracy is not a title that we will hang on the wall once we have won, and this reality will be tested to its limits in the coming weeks.
Democracy is a daily and painful construction. It is threatened today. And we will come with it.
We need to build our own catapults with justice and the rule of law. Our weapons of hope and despair are not weapons in the hands of those we must face. The fight is uneven. And that’s exactly why we should be optimistic.
We will not destroy hate with more hate. Deep down, democracy is a promise. This fate is partly in our hands. Having a say over our future. Tomorrow is not the future unless it is a now rooted in sound justice and the rule of law.
Minister, help us collect our catapults.
Democratic greetings
jamil
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source: Noticias
