There is something that I really don’t understand. How could the Davos World Economic Forum organisers give the keynote speech on Day 1 to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro? Does it make sense to give such a major platform to a president who has called Africans and Haitians the scum of the earth and said that Afro-Brazilians are obese and lazy and shouldn’t be allowed to procreate?
But beyond Bolsonaro’s racism, he is militarising Brazilian politics, appointing military generals to his cabinet, and he romanticises the days when Brazil was led by a military dictatorship, and killed civilian dissidents. Bolsonaro will single-handedly add to the environment’s destruction by advocating development of parts of the Amazon. He’s refused to host this year’s UN Summit on Climate Change. He is the antithesis of what Davos is supposed to be about.
When we elevate such leaders and give them high-profile platforms to air their views, we have failed to learn from history. It gives them credibility. Bolsonaro was embraced and warmly thanked for his speech. WEF allowed him to sell his extreme right-wing views to the world, and made his positions sound acceptable.
Bolsonaro has made himself the flag bearer for Latin America’s new conservative vanguard, and used his WEF speech to sound a death knell for the Bolivarian left, saying “the left will not prevail”. Bolsonaro told 3000 of the world’s top business and political leaders that ideology has no place anymore. His plans are to purge left-wing ideology from politics and society. Within months of being in office he imposed measures to control civil society, curb LGBT rights, and loosened restrictions on gun ownership.
He boasted about his plans for the “New Brazil”, and how he will to stamp out corruption. But the front page of a leading Brazilian newspaper reported on how his son, newly elected Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, is linked to a Rio death squad, infamous for its involvement in organised crime and corruption. It is now said Flavio has put the sword of Damocles over his father’s head. So much for Bolsonaro’s mantra that he will govern by example.
If WEF wanted to elevate a Latin American leader, why did they not choose Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno? He has proved to be one of the most visionary leaders on the globe, engaging in real and deep transformation of his society, achieving remarkable success in reducing poverty and inequality.
He has ensured that Ecuador has the lowest levels of unemployment in Latin America, and he has more than doubled the minimum wage for domestic workers, making employers also pay social security and transport.
He has democratised access to higher education, investing in it more than any other Latin American government, and taken thousands of children off the streets and put them in schools.
Moreno is hailed as one of the world’s leading advocates for the rights of the disabled, and is the only head of state in a wheelchair.
Bolsonaro, on the other hand, promised to have a government directly headed by businessmen committed to increase private
profit. He has said he will reduce
the minimum wage, end various labour rights, and ensure the
private appropriation of all possible natural resources, trampling over traditional populations and environmental concerns.
He will privatise social security, public education and health.
I will tell you why a president like Moreno will never be thrust into the limelight, or his views given oxygen - he is not controversial, he doesn’t make headlines, and he doesn’t add to the hype in the way that Bolsonaro does. So while Bolsonaro, with his arguably neo-fascist agenda, will be courted by the one of the most sought-after forums in the world, those who quietly fight for the rights of the poor and improve their lives will be ignored.
Ebrahim is the group foreign editor for Independent Media.