There is a paragraph in Brazil’s constitution, approved by the governments of the dictatorship, that refers to the military, which dubbed the far-right coup chaired by former President Jair Bolsonaro as “the four lines of the constitution” and he has spent his four years in government threatening to carry them out.
In reality, it is rather a misinterpretation of the Constitution that Bolsonarismo has used to intimidate the left and will continue to do so if the current government of Lula da Silva does not take the opportunity to expose this misinterpretation and coup-like interpretation that would allow the army to intervene in state institutions.
Conversely, the so-called four lines of the constitution actually intended to delimit the powers of the armed forces, which should be in the service of state institutions without their own powers to intervene in politics.
This is Article 42 of the constitutional text, which deals with the rights and duties of the army. In that small paragraph, with which Bolsonaro threatened democracy to the last, it is legally regulated that the military “under the supreme authority of the President of the Republic” must “guarantee the defense of the fatherland and the constitutional duties”. The constitution at no point admits or defends that the military can be a “moderating power,” something Bolsonaro’s extreme right has insisted on defending in all coup demonstrations.
In order to avoid in the future that these four lines of the constitution are further exploited by the extreme right, which dreams of the return of the military to power, the Workers’ Party (PT), through MP Carlos Zarattini, has presented to Congress a constitutional amendment to raise doubts in the role of the military in a democratic regime like Brazil’s.
“We want to change that in the constitution to avoid misinterpretations. The armed forces are not power over others and cannot, for example, encroach on the powers of the Federal Court of Justice or Parliament, as former President Bolsonaro and his main coup wing vainly claimed during his four-year reign.
However, the thorny problem of correcting the constitutional text on the power of the armed forces will not be easy for the new Lula government, as the military’s historical reservations about left-wing governments are well known.
To change the aforementioned four lines of the 1988 constitution, the government would need an absolute majority in both Parliament and Senate, which are currently dominated by Bolsonarista votes that would be reluctant to accept such a change for fear of losing power armed forces.
However, the surviving authors of the current constitutional text confirm that these four lines of the constitution not only did not intend to make the military the moderators of state power, but on the contrary, they were intended to limit their power, placing them at the command of the real power left to the state.
The fact that the drafting of this constitutional text, albeit complicated, could concede the extreme right to confer powers on the army that it does not have, is due to the fact that at that time Brazil was coming out of a harsh and difficult period of long military dictatorship and had to refine his words regarding the institutional purpose of the armed forces as auxiliaries of political power, and never again as a separate power capable of encroaching on constitutional powers, the linchpin of the new democracy.
In case this was not clear, the General Secretariat of the Chamber of Deputies, in an opinion dated June 4, 2020, clarified that Article 42 of the Constitution of the Armed Forces does not allow military intervention under the pretext of “restoring order”. According to the Parliament: “There is no democratic country in the world where the law has given the armed forces the function of mediating conflicts between the constitutional powers or giving the final say on the meaning of the constitutional text.”
With ex-President Bolsonaro wanting to force said constitutional text to threaten to call on the army on behalf of the constitution to act against the decisions of Congress or the Supreme Court, it is now all the more urgent that the new democratic government seize the opportunity of said controversial ones Amending paragraphs of the constitution so as not to give the extreme right, which will be alive in Brazil with or without Bolsonaro, even more excuses to attempt military intervention.
The new Lula government must not only seek to resolve the severe economic crisis Brazil is going through and which is martyring millions of workers who cannot finish the month or feed their children with dignity, and have to live with it forever, that the armed forces have no place in the constitution to attempt to be arbiters and controllers of state and political power.
To do that, Lula must, as he has already begun, “demilitarize” the state institutions where Bolsonarismo had housed a whopping more than 6,000 privilege-laden soldiers who are only reluctantly beginning to leave government and the rest of the state estates.
Lula and his government will need to do all of this with great tact and diplomacy, lest it appear as punishment or vengeance on the left against an army that was never as coddled or had as much influence in the state as it was in the disastrous Bolsonaro government.
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