For 21 days, we feared waking up to a Brazil that the citizenry handed over to our worst members. We narrowly escaped, not because there were too few people willing to push us over the edge, but despite them. And no one can claim they didn’t know.

For 21 days, I lived with a knot of anxiety in my stomach. I began to understand something of what people must have felt during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the world came close to nuclear war. On Sunday, October 25, millions of Brazilians must have woken up as I did, with the bitter thought that one of the worst possible Brazilians might have been elected president of the Republic.

Yes, if you voted for Flávio Bolsonaro, you had every democratic right to vote for a candidate whose record and public positions have been associated with racism, homophobia, corruption scandals and alleged ties to organized crime. That is the right democracy guarantees you. We already knew enough about the candidate. Now we know something about you, too: what you accept, what you are willing to tolerate and which other people’s rights you consider negotiable when your own interests, prejudices or conveniences are at stake. You made your choice. I made mine, and it includes remembering yours.

For 21 days, I thought about what could happen to the people I love, including my children, and the country we live in. I have no obligation to grant you the benefit of forgetting, much less the automatic forgiveness so often demanded of people who have been threatened by those now eager to turn the page. You wanted this Brazil for us. I hope you get back, in full measure, everything you wished upon others.

May fiscal conservatives pay, corruption fighters lose

To the self-described fiscal conservatives who turned budget discipline into a matter of principle, I hope you pay every cent of the taxes you wanted to impose on the poor, without discounts, amnesties or privileges for your friends. May you experience the same austerity when the bill comes to your own door. It is easy to preach fiscal responsibility when somebody else is footing the bill.

To those who voted in the name of fighting corruption in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT), I hope you follow your political idols through every last consequence of the investigations and legal proceedings involving them. May your selective indignation cost you sleep, public embarrassment and difficult explanations to your children. May there be no shortage of cigarettes for anyone wishing to take them to their protégés in prison, when they are arrested, as so many Brazilians once said their political opponents deserved.

And may the cases involving Daniel Vorcaro, alleged fraud against retirees, rachadinhas, Bolsonaro’s chocolate shop scandal and business dealings connected to the coastal town of Angra dos Reis receive the same attention that these people devoted to scandals involving the PT. (A rachadinha is a scheme in which public officials allegedly force staff members to return part of their salaries, diverting public money for private or political use.) These cases are not interchangeable, but corruption does not change its nature when it switches parties; only the face of the person trying to hide it changes.

May public security voters feel insecure

To those who voted in the name of public security, I hope you discover what it means to live under the power of people who turn the police into an instrument of political protection, maintain dangerous relationships with paramilitary criminal groups and treat violence as electoral entertainment. In Brazil, these groups are known as milícias: armed organizations often linked to current or former police officers, which exercise territorial control and profit from extortion and illegal services.

May the story of Adriano da Nóbrega, the conviction of murderer Ronnie Lessa and the tributes paid to dangerous militia figures keep you awake at night as often as you wished fear, suffering and violence upon residents of Brazil’s urban peripheries. Lessa was convicted for his role in the 2018 assassination of Marielle Franco, a black, gay city councilwoman from Rio de Janeiro and prominent critic of police violence and militia power. Nóbrega, a former police officer accused of leading a criminal militia, was killed in 2020. His connections to members of the Bolsonaro family became a subject of public controversy.

May the victims’ families spit at you the same outrage you displayed when you could attack your political opponents with tragedy. And may Ana Clara Gomes Machado’s death never be forgotten by those who made public security their banner while ignoring their own candidates’ contradictions. (Ana Clara, aged five, died by a rifle shot in 2021 in Rio de Janeiro, fired by a police officer. Flávio Bolsonaro defended the killer and attempted to get his trial dismissed.)

May Justice Moraes’s opponents be judged

To those who spent years shouting against Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court and treating Justice Alexandre de Moraes as the source of every national evil, I hope you get judged by the same standards you applied to your opponents, without protection from friends, without crimes being excused and without the sudden discovery that every accused person deserves a defense.

Moraes voted in favor of imprisoning President Lula da Silva, was appointed to the Supreme Court by former President Michel Temer and began his political career in a party associated with the former Mayor of São Paulo, Gilberto Kassab. You knew these things and still chose to demonize Moraes. But he became associated with Lula when he ordered the arrest of former President Jair Bolsonaro. And people hated him for that, despite him only doing so after it became known that Bolsonaro’s supporters were plotting a coup d’état to kill him. Now let consistency keep you company when you have to assess the justices you like, including those whose conservative and religious rhetoric seems to function as an advance certificate of innocence. Especially the orgy enthusiasts and the “terribly evangelical” ones.

May science deniers be rejected, education destroyers be schooled

To those who supported the government responsible for the genocidal handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, I hope you experience the anguish of depending on authorities who despise science, make light of death and turn a public health emergency into an ideological battlefield. May you know the helplessness of waiting for an answer that never comes, the fear of losing someone dear and the rage of listening to excuses from authorities who were supposed to protect the population. You helped legitimize that policy. You knew what you were supporting.

To those who accepted the destruction of education and culture in the name of a supposed war against communism, I hope your children receive the same schooling you helped impose on other people’s children. You’ll have to explain why ministers and government officials were appointed despite their incompetence, why cultural production became a target of political persecution and why the Bible appeared in the same political landscape as gold bars, while members of the government echoed the rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief. May the censorship, ignorance and obscurantism you championed for people you dislike fail to stop at your own front door.

May evangelicals choke on their hypocrisy

And to the evangelicals who blindly supported such a vile politician whose actions contradict the morality he publicly proclaims, I hope one day you have to answer to your own communities for the distance between the Gospel you preach and the political project you sustained.

You demonized Lula while offering moral protection to a man who found excuses for violence and authoritarianism. May the same severity you applied to your opponent fall upon your pastors, leaders and candidates. And may you be unable to use God’s name as a hiding place for choices you can explain only through convenience.

Lula’s governments lifted millions of Brazilians out of hunger, and the fight against poverty should carry weight in the judgment of anyone who claims to care about Christian values. Many of you preferred to turn poverty into a political weapon and treat the dignity of starving people as a minor detail compared with the fear of a government you could not control. I hope you never have to discover, at your own dinner table, what it means not to have enough food. But if that day comes, remember that you helped elect people who promised to deny others what you would demand for yourselves.

We will remember their fascism

There is an old saying: if ten people are sitting at a table and a fascist arrives, takes a seat, and nobody objects, there are not 11 people at the table. There are 11 fascists. In our case, there is an aggravating circumstance: Many people did not merely open the door, pull up a chair and offer the newcomer coffee. They campaigned, spread lies, financed the propaganda machine and voted to put him in charge of the house. Then, when someone pointed out the fascism sitting among the guests, they were told that all opinions deserved respect.

No. The democratic right to vote does not make every choice morally neutral. You can vote for whomever you want, but you cannot ask that others forget what your vote means, especially when it helps threaten the rights, safety and freedom of millions.

I am not writing to persuade those who have already decided that their own convenience is worth more than democracy. I am writing to record that we saw what happened, understood what was at stake and will not accept the normalization of it all. Time may erase details, but it does not absolve choices.

It was 21 days. I will not forget who worked to put my children at risk, who wanted us to suffer and who justified voting for the intolerable. I will not forget the names, the statements, the lies or the smiles of those who treated other people’s suffering as an acceptable price to pay.

You had the right to vote for Flávio Bolsonaro. I have the right to remember that you did. And when you come asking me to forget, you will find my memory sitting at the table, occupying precisely the chair you reserved for fascism.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.