Opinion: Bolsonaro Helps Weintraub Flee, Proving He Uses Government to Protect Friends

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) “President Jair Bolsonaro helped Abraham Weintraub flee the country. There is no other way to explain what happened.

The Ministry of Education confirmed to UOL that he landed in Miami on a commercial flight on Saturday, June 20th. The announcement was also posted on social media by his brother, Arthur, special adviser to the Presidency.

Only after landing in the United States was he formally dismissed from the Ministry of Education by Bolsonaro through a special edition of the Federal Gazette.

This gave him time to use his diplomatic passport, which he relied on to enter the USA. Uncle Sam had banned entry to foreigners who had been in Brazil, for fear that the uncontrolled pandemic here would jeopardize the containment of the coronavirus there. But with this government document, this ban did not affect him.

Abraham Weintraub was appointed by the administration to a position in the World Bank’s executive board in Washington DC. Bolsonaro was not only looking for an honorable way out for one of his most loyal allies, but also a way to protect him. Apparently, the deal also included ensuring his swift departure from Brazil.

Weintraub had said he would pass the baton on to the next-in-charge. And there was no arrest warrant issued by the courts against him, despite requests from deputies to this effect. However, he refused to wait and ran. ‘The top priority is for me to get out of Brazil as soon as possible. Now is to prevent them from arresting me, jailing and and killing me,’ he had told CNN Brasil on Friday, June 19th. The following day he was already posting from Miami, according to his Twitter.

And it won’t come as a surprise if he sells himself as a political refugee, saying that he ran away so as not to be punished for his beliefs – when he was the one, until recently, chasing and threatening students, professors, researchers, and STF justices. It is like the coward who heads the beating of a person and when the police take him to the police station, he cries and says that he is the victim of an injustice.

‘The use of a Minister’s diplomatic passport was illegal, as well as immoral. It is a misuse of purpose. As an international fugitive, Weintraub must be deported to Brazil and arrested,’ said Senator Randolfe Rodrigues. The ex-Minister is the target of an inquiry that investigates attacks on the STF (advocating the arrest of Court members) and another, which is assessing racist attacks against Chinese citizens.

This form of action by Bolsonaro is similar to his interference in the selection of the Federal Police Director General: using the Republic’s institutions for his own purposes. A diplomatic passport should not be used to protect the interests of friends, but rather to perform duties of interest to the country.

‘I won’t wait for my whole family to be fucked, or my friends,’ said Bolsonaro at the now infamous April 22nd cabinet meeting, which was released by the Supreme Court after ex-Minister of Justice Sérgio Moro named it as evidence of such interference. The President complained about the lack of information from the Federal Police to protect his own, saying he would appoint whoever he needed to get it.

‘We’re not here to play games,’ he stressed. As if there were ever any doubts about that.

The Federal Police, COAF, IBAMA, INCRA, ICMBio, FUNAI, Ministry of Foreign Relations. Since taking office, Jair Bolsonaro has been working to subordinate institutions in the name of his power project. His preference is for monitoring, inspection and control bodies. But he does not limit his efforts to them, as the subversion of diplomatic tools showed yesterday morning.

He claims to rule on the basis of ‘popular desire,’ provided, of course, that he defines what that would be. He says he fights corruption, but tries to cloud any investigation that examines evidence of irregular practices by himself, his allies, and his family – such as the embezzlement of public funds by Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, when he was still a state legislator, who used a Queiroz as a figurehead.

The clan’s national project is an authoritarian populist government supported by sectors of the far-right and part of the business community. In this plan, most institutions are tamed and serve the president. Part of the Congress is being bought, in installments, by the granting of (administrative) positions. And those that cannot be tamed are regarded as enemies: the Supreme Court has been the target of calls for closure by the President’s fanatical followers since last year. Bolsonaro came to the point of speaking in rallies that demanded a new Institutional Act #5 and a military coup.

As a result, the Republic is being bowed to the needs of a family and its allies. If nothing is urgently done, some institutions will become accomplices to this in the same way that Bolsonaro was an accomplice in Weintraub’s escape.

Just in time: speaking of getaways by government supporters, where is the fugitive Márcia Oliveira de Aguiar, Queiroz’s wife?”

Source: Leonardo Sakamoto, UOL June 20, 2020.