Every statesman makes missteps. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he was “happy” to leave Belem and return to his “beautiful” country. It was ugly. In Bolsonaro, the phrase “I am not a rapist, but if I were I would not rape her because she does not deserve it,” about a member of parliament, is not a misstep, but rather a revelation of an evil “soul”: he himself was the misstep of a Republican.
Lola is a repeat offender. Your last one is worth discussing because of possible misunderstandings. He blurted out something like “drug dealer victimized user”. Literally, this statement is ridiculous to anyone with even the slightest awareness of the damage drug trafficking does to society and families. Fatigue or lack of concentration impairs mental processing, leading to slips of the tongue.
But it is enough to change “victim” to “accomplice” for the phrase to be placed in a close context, perhaps where censorship comes from. In fact, drug use represents a crime in which the victim, through his voluntary commitment to this act, becomes an accomplice of the criminal. The weight of free will in making the decision to expose oneself to danger, to the point of no return, is great.
There are reasons of a social and psychological nature. But there is also an unnoticeable shift: the anthropological changes that have occurred throughout the capitalist world since the two great world wars. These are the same sadomasochistic tendencies that are a staple of fascist anthropology, where individuals are free to follow instincts, whether violent ones against others or themselves. Freed from social subjugation, they can become fanatical followers of a political system or fanatical devotees of their own ego. Gradual withdrawal from societal socialization (family, school, work, friends) results in a loss of access to emotions.
The numbing of the rich and the poor responds, in some, to adjustment to a spectacular life, and in others, to the illusion of relief from the seeming unbearability of the world. Moments of false happiness, in a world without joy, deliberate suicide. This feeds international narcotics, against which repressive bureaucratic structures wage a war of dry ice. The resulting social gangrene only increases.
Hence the futility of the war on drugs through bloodbaths and biased justifications for police actions. Trump’s equating of human trafficking with terrorism represents a blatant interventionist strategy in the hemisphere. The undisputed leader of the Global South, Lula, is aware of this fact. As a ruler, like his predecessors, he reduced the extent of organized crime, without finding a realistic position on the left on the problem.
Now, alarmed by its own sense of discomfort, the government has begun to strengthen its public security plans through the rhetoric of fighting without violence or terrorism, amid internal obstacles that demonstrate the extent of drug trafficking that has already infiltrated the Brazilian state apparatus. As for Lula, for someone who gave five speeches in two days at the UN climate change conference in Belém, the verbal misstep is just an accident along the way: it shows that the drug problem is also a language problem.
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