Outsourcing Repression
Bolsonaro doesn't need an open military dictatorship to crush his opponents. As the "Colombian model" demonstrates, he can lean on violent paramilitaries to do the dirty work for him.
A woman wears a T-shirt asking, “Who ordered Marielle killed?” during a special congressional session on the murder of Marielle Franco in Brasília, Brazil on March 18, 2019. (Mídia NINJA / Flickr)
One afternoon in late 1987, Jaime Pardo Leal was shot dead in his car some fifty kilometers east of Bogotá. The circumstances surrounding the murder were powerfully captured in the pages of Colombian weekly, Semana:
Jaime Pardo Leal knew they were going to kill him. His family knew they were going to kill him. The Patriotic Union knew they were going to kill him. Journalists knew they were going to kill him. The whole country knew they were going to kill him. And finally, they killed him. It was 3:45 p.m. on Sunday, October 11.
The poignant mixture of tragedy and absurdity seems like it could have been lifted from the pages of a Gabriel García Márquez novel. How could everyone know that the most prominent leader of the leftist Patriotic Union (UP) party would be assassinated, and yet nothing be done to prevent it? In fact, this was pure realism, with none of the magic. It was an accurate summary of the country’s political impasse.
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