"It looked like a dolphin showing off." This is how the president of Caixa Econômica Federal is portrayed in the pool. As Reinaldo Azevedo wrote, the Bolsonaro government is so absurd that it lacks verisimilitude. The flipper moment might not have passed in the analysis of this B-movie script that is the country. The phrase reported to Folha certainly does: "I'm in the mood for you." Not even a mythological being, in the water or in the office, can speak so nauseatingly.
It's incredible that Pedro Guimarães has not been denounced earlier because of his open record last week. It lasted three and a half years, almost the entire term of Jair Bolsonaro, of whom he is a smiling enthusiast, below the radar of the press. Will it be? A colleague from Brasília says that some cases were known, but that there was no proof or means of counting them. In the times when he journalistically faced the boto, no hugs, only confrontation, threats of lawsuits and rudeness in general.
If it wasn't just the Caixa corridors that got a bad reputation, why did it take so long for the country to know more about who took care of the largest public banking institution in Latin America? Hard to say. The current electoral pressure may have helped. Pandora's boxes are being opened all over the country, against current and former rulers and politicians. It is a reasonable explanation, says the colleague, who presents, however, a more plausible hypothesis: someone finally had the courage to denounce, perhaps foreshadowing a change of government and a lesser chance of suffering retaliation. After all, before a political story, the episode is the daily life of many workers in this country of male goats.
According to O Globo, Guimarães' history is old, dating back to 2004. He tried to kiss an employee in front of several people during a Santander New Year's party, but was fired for his low professional performance. He passed through other institutions and arrived at the government guided by Paulo Guedes without his behavior being noticed. Or, even worse, perhaps with the profile of a tolerated abuser. A past easily detectable if the bar were higher, as it happens with other frequency in the civilized outside, be it in the corporate world or in the public service. There and here the press is just the last filter.
SEESAW
Among all the outlets of the mainstream media aimed against the Bolsonaro government and its numerous ills, the revelation about the harassment of Pedro Guimarães fell to the column of Rodrigo Rangel, from Metrópoles. The Brasiliense website, owned by the impeached and convicted senator Luiz Estevão, is already one of the most read in the country with less than seven years on the road.
PUBLICITY
The portal works in a curious way, moving with ease both in the political intricacies of the federal capital and in the mundane universe of celebrities and cliques. This explains the jump from bad journalism to the scoop in a few days of last week: the site, like a British tabloid, invaded the privacy of actress Klara Castanho (in a text published shortly after with apologies from the author and the executive director), episode of immense negative repercussion, to, 48 hours later, broadcast the club in Guimarães.
Two very different articles about women leaving the same newsroom. B-movie script is even beyond logic.
DRIVE TO SURVIVE
Thiago Amparo commented in his column on Folha's headline about the first drop in the police fatality rate in eight years, one of the conclusions of the yearbook of the Brazilian Forum on Public Security. The murder rate dropped by 4%. As numbers prove anything, Eduardo Bolsonaro declared that the explanation was in the greater number of armed people, reinforcing the Bolsonarist fallacy of western imports from the USA.
The violence actually only happened in the "Sweden" that exists within the country, according to Amparo's description (I confess that I am from the time of Belgium, the rich part of Belíndia by Edmar Bacha). Among whites, the rate dropped by 31%. On the "Syrian side," another description of him, police lethality against blacks increased by 5.8%. What is more news, is police lethality falling in general or rising against the black population? Perspective is important in this country of racists.
Perhaps someone read this last paragraph and complained intimately or openly that life is getting more and more boring in the face of so many ponderings. Then it is recommended to read another column of the week, that of Djamila Ribeiro, about the three-time champion Nelson Piquet having called the seven-time champion Sir Lewis Hamilton "neguinho", in an interview last year rescued from some cave by social networks.
There is no possible equivalence between boredom and violence. Brazil is a bad movie.
Translated by Kiratiana Freelon
José Henrique Mariante
Trained as an engineer and journalist, Mariante has been a reporter, correspondent, editor and editorial secretary at Folha, where he has worked since 1991. He is the ombudsman.