Globo columnist Bernardo Melo Franco returns to the country’s recent past to propose a new reading of the texts he published between the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and the attempted coup of January 8, 2023. The columns have now been collected in the book “Architecture of Destruction: Memoirs of the Bolsonaro Era, from Platform to Condemnation,” by Autêntica Editora, and form something of a memoir. Of the authoritarian escalation in that period.
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The work follows key moments from the Bolsonaro years: the tense and violent 2018 campaign; The stab, which had the side effect of protecting Bolsonaro from criticism; The epidemic faced by a government that “truly fought during the largest health crisis in history”; And the “hijacking” of national symbols such as the flag.
– Anyone who encounters these pages will see that since 2018, we have already identified in Bolsonaro’s candidacy a clear authoritarian project, which would inevitably provoke an institutional crisis – says the columnist.
But Milo Franco points out that even those who followed the issue on a daily basis did not take into account the extent of what the investigations left behind the scenes:
Bolsonaro was expected to attempt a coup to stay in power if he is defeated in 2022, but no one knows for sure how that will happen. I think even I was surprised by the details of the plot that emerged in the investigations: “The Green and Yellow Dagger,” the plan to kill Lola…
Milo Franco recalls that this period was characterized by a siege of the press, attacks on the professional press, especially women, and that the media needed to organize themselves to obtain data about the epidemic.
– Autocrats, whether from the left or the right, view the press as the enemy. One of the most dangerous moments in this path was when the government ordered the Ministry of Health to hide data on deaths in the epidemic. The mainstream media had to form a consortium to investigate themselves, he recalls.
The title of Milo Franco’s book comes from a column from the end of 2019. That year, Bolsonaro declared: “Brazil is not an open field, where we intend to build things for our people. We have to dismantle a lot of things.”
For Milo Franco, the phrase was not just a speech, but a government program.
He wanted to seize the oversight bodies, empty models of popular participation, and demolish the pillars of the 1988 Constitution. No analyst has defined Bolsonaro’s government like Bolsonaro himself.
The writer points out in the publication that the extreme right has established permanent roots in the country. For 2026, he sees a conservative field with no natural candidate, but remembers that in politics, it’s usually the unlikely who rules the scenario.
— In 2014, one of the candidates died in a plane crash. In 2018, another was stabbed. In 2022, the president deployed police on the streets to try to prevent people from voting. In politics, we learn that the only thing stable in Brazil is instability.
And in Rio, “Geometry of Destruction” will be launched next Wednesday, at 7 p.m., at Livraria da Travessa de Botafogo, with a conversation with sociologist Celso Rocha de Barros. It is scheduled to be launched in São Paulo, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte, in the presence of the columnist.
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