Trump’s Bromance with Brazil’s Bolsonaro

 By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times &Transcript

Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is on trial in the country’s Supreme Court, accused of masterminding a plot to stage a coup after he lost the 2022 presidential elections to leftist candidate Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva. Another 33 people have been charged, including former ministers and generals.

It marks the first time in Brazilian history that a former head of state is being tried for attempting to overthrow the government. His supporters also attacked Brazil’s Congress building and Presidential offices in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023.

Federal police earlier this year released two reports that detailed the accusations, including that he personally edited a decree for a national state of emergency designed to prevent the election’s winner from taking office. Bolsonaro has denied plotting a coup but admitted that he had “studied other alternatives within the Constitution” that would allow him to remain in power after his electoral defeat. He abandoned the plan after leaders of Brazil’s military refused to take part. If convicted, he could face up to 12 years in prison. Bolsonaro, a former army officer, has praised Brazil’s military dictatorship which lasted from 1964 to 1985. 

Bolsonaro has already been barred from running for office until 2030, but is hoping that Congress will overturn his election ban. He called the ruling “a rape of democracy” and said he was trying to find a way to run in next year’s presidential election.

If you think this sounds similar to what happened to Donald Trump when he was defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election and then saw his supporters storm the U.S. Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, you’re not alone. The president thinks so too and isn’t letting it go unnoticed. He has singled out Brazil for import tariffs of 50 per cent, to take effect on Aug. 1, for its treatment of its former president.

When Bolsonaro won the presidency in 2018, many people called him the “Trump of the Tropics.” I guess they weren’t kidding. Like Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in 2020, Bolsonaro has also rejected the 2022 Brazilian result, when he lost to the left-wing Lula.

Trump has described Bolsonaro as a friend and reminded people that he hosted Bolsonaro at the White House in 2019 and at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2020 when both were in power. In Trump’s first term, few world leaders were a more reliable ally than Bolsonaro.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Bolsonaro publicly questioned the results and was one of the last heads of state to recognize Biden’s victory. And after Bolsonaro was defeated in Brazil’s 2022 vote, he left for self-imposed exile in Florida for several months, only returning to Brazil at the end of March in 2023.

On the other hand, Lula felt a political kinship with Biden as two leaders who saw themselves as having overcome attempted insurrections, and last year, Lula openly supported Kamala Harris against Trump.

Seeking to obtain explicit support, Bolsonaro’s third son, Eduardo, a member of Brazil’s Congress and his family’s most eloquent international voice, took a leave from his legislative duties and moved to the U.S. early this year. He did so to lobby on behalf of his father. It seems to have worked.

“This trial should not be taking place,” President Trump wrote in a July 9 letter posted on his Truth Social website. He called Bolsonaro’s prosecution a “witch hunt” which should be ended immediately. “I have watched, as has the world, as they have done nothing but come after him, day after day, night after night, month after month, year after year! He is not guilty of anything, except having fought for the people.”

Delighted by Trump's statement, Bolsonaro wrote on X: “Thank you for being there and for setting an example of faith and resilience.”

 This would certainly hurt Brazil economically. “He’s found that tariffs can be a very effective weapon modifying the behaviour of other countries,” according to Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary in Trump’s first term.

Legal experts questioned whether the president had the authority to issue tariffs in pursuit of purely political objectives. Is a Brazilian political issue a threat to U.S. economic or national security? That’s doubtful.

Meanwhile, Lula has rejected what he called “interference or threats” by the U.S. and stated that he would respond, while maintaining that Bolsonaro “is the sole responsibility of the Brazilian Judiciary. Brazil is a sovereign nation with independent institutions and will not accept any form of tutelage.”

Brazil is apparently weighing imposing tariffs on specific American products or sectors, the government does not plan to apply broad-based tariffs on all American products. The United States is Brazil’s second biggest trading partner, after China and accounts for roughly 12 per cent of all Brazil’s exports. One possible impact of tariffs could be higher coffee prices in the United States. Brazil is the world’s biggest producer of coffee, and the U.S. is its biggest customer.

But recent polls show Lula losing to most potential candidates in next year’s election. Assuming Bolsonaro remains ineligible, the most likely winner would be the current governor of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas, who served as the minister of infrastructure for Bolsonaro. The parallel to the 2024 American presidential election is apt.

History of a Holocaust Survivor Turned Eighty

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

July 19, my 80^th birthday -- a milestone, yes, but for me, an even bigger one was just being born. My parents were Holocaust survivors, and I found out just a few months ago that, technically, so am I. My parents were from Czestochowa, Poland, where I was born in 1945. By 1943 most Jews in the city, including their own families, had been murdered by the Nazis, at Treblinka, and after the uprising in the Jewish ghetto, my parents, by now married, became slave labour in a major Nazi munitions plant, the HASAG-Pelcery concentration camp, in the city.

The Russian army liberated Czestochowa January 16-17, 1945, and I was born July 19, six months later. You can do the math. My mother was emaciated and didn’t even know she was pregnant, but another month, and it would have been obvious, and she would have been killed. (I never asked how this happened but found out when listening to her testimony for the Shoah Foundation in 1995. The men and women were housed in different barracks, but one night the Germans were delousing one of the buildings and allowed married couples to sleep together in the other.)

In 1945 the 9^th of Av fell on July 19, and the Jewish world had just gone through our worst period in history. I was born in a makeshift hospital at the Jasna Gora, the famed Pauline Catholic monastery in the city. The actual city hospital had been destroyed in the fighting. It is home to the Matka Boska Czestochowska, (“the mother of God”), a very beautiful and large icon of Mary and the baby Jesus. Other women giving birth were surprised and one said, “Ona jest Zydowka.” (She’s a Jew.) So, though I am a proud Polish Jew, this could only have helped! The doctor who delivered whispered to my mother that he was Jewish but added that he wanted it kept quiet because he wasn’t going to leave Poland. It also took awhile for a mohel to come to the city for me.

The next few years were spent in Pocking-Waldstadt, a DP camp in the American zone in Bavaria, Germany, and then on to Pier 21 in Halifax and Canada. We lived in Montreal, though at home we were to all intents and purposes in Czestochowa, Jewish Poland.

As I was packing up my books in May because we all had to vacate our offices for the summer due to repairs in our building, I came across a book that I had never read – I don’t even recall where I got it -- by the Polish historian Lucjan Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records 1944-1947 (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994). Chapter 5 is comprised of “Lists of Jewish Children Who Survived,” in alphabetical order. I am listed on p. 146 (Heniek Srebrnik, 1945). I sent in a form to the Claims Conference in New York informing them. So, at age 80, I’ve become a Holocaust survivor! Compared to that start, the next decades have been easy street! As the Aussies say, “no worries! But the Jewish world has grown darker. Like many others, were I to write a memoir, I’d call it From Hitler to Hamas.

I grew up in Montreal, and have lived in Calgary and Charlottetown, as well as London, England, and four American cities. But I’ve only been to Winnipeg twice, in 1982 and, more dramatically, the weekend of Sept. 7-10, 2001. I presented a paper on “Birobidzhan on the Prairies: Two Decades of Pro-Soviet Jewish Movements in Winnipeg,” to a conference on “Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 1905-1960,” organized by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada. I left the morning of Sept. 11. An hour into the flight to Toronto we were told all airplanes had to land at the nearest major airport. I spent the next three days in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., with fellow passengers. We mostly watched the television reporting on the 9/11 catastrophe.

Though an academic, I have always written for newspapers, including Jewish ones, in Canada and the United States. Some, like the Jewish Free Press of Calgary, the Jewish Tribune of Toronto, and the previous version of the Canadian Jewish News, no longer exist, which is a shame. Fortunately, the Jewish Post still does.