License to Kill

Olavo de Carvalho
Brazzil, Politics, January 2003

There's no other place in which the threads of the world's revolutionary net show up as clearly as in Latin America. However, they are only visible to those observers who, jumping over the heavy camouflage laid over the facts by an accomplice media, have the guts and the capacity to research by themselves, making use of resources from the Internet.

On that matter, the most important, most revealing piece of news to appear lately was suppressed, like a thousand others, from the Brazilian media: Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez sent Al-Qaeda a million dollars a few days after September 11, 2001.

The information comes from the most trustworthy of all sources: the man in charge of the operation, Juan Diaz Castillo, an officer of the Venezuelan Air Force and, at the time, the pilot of Hugo Chávez's presidential aircraft.

A confession in full detail can be found in the website of the Venezuelan Military officers opposing Chávez, http://militaresdemocraticos.surebase.com/articulos/en/20021231-01.html I do not ask you, dear readers, to believe in me. Go to the website. Check it out. Eliminate your doubts writing directly to Castillo. His e-mail address is [email protected] I wrote him and he confirmed everything.

The same website informs that Islamic terrorists and agents of the DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia—General Intelligence Directorate), the Cuban secret police, hold decisive positions in the structure created by Chávez to suffocate the national strike that threatens to throw him out.

The arrogance of Brazil's leftist journalists makes them believe it is OK to deny the readers news of such importance, so that you may remain etherized in the pinky illusion of a moment of collective insanity.

But not only on that side is the illusion beginning to fade, even if the new government is still in its first days. The appointment of Mr. Luiz Eduardo Soares for National Secretary of Public Security is enough to show what kind of 'war on crime' can be expected from federal authorities in the next years. If you don't know Mr. Soares, you don't know what you are missing.

Intellectually, as I have demonstrated in 'The Collective Imbecile II', he is someone who sticks political labels on people about whom he ignores everything, who pontificates on subjects he doesn't understand and who affects erudition quoting authors he has not read. He is the typical Latin American pseudo-intellectual, a mind so empty of culture as it is full of moralizing platitudes against the evils of capitalism. Nobody could represent the new government's mentality better than him.

On the moral side, he is even more interesting. If you do not remember, he is that sub-secretary of security from Rio de Janeiro who, knowing the whereabouts of the drug lord and murderer Marcinho VP, sought by the police at the time, and knowing that the criminal had the financial support of filmmaker João Moreira Sales, actively hid that from the authorities.

Mr. Soares did not explain why he did that. He just threw accusations against the "rotten side" of the police as if the rottenness of something could serve as a justification for the rottenness of something else and went to the US, where he found the opportunity to shine in one of those universities filled with friends of international terrorism as the hero of a cause which, in his imagination, couldn't be more noble.

Contrasting with Mr. Soares's silence, Mr. Sales decided to talk. According to him, Marcinho VP deserved help because he had the most respectable aspiration of going to Mexico to do some guerrilla training with the Zapatistas and the police confirmed later that he actually went there.

A similar pretext was used by the members of the leftist elite who protected the kidnappers of millionaire Abílio Diniz. As soon as the secret that these were armed agents of the Chilean Communist Party came to light, those wonderful people immediately covered the compromising liaison, in a sudden display of contempt for their former protégés, under the allegation that these were just regular criminals, unfaithful to the Party, who killed and kidnapped for money and not for a cause. Truly an inverted camouflage, for it showed the intention of imposing on the public, above the respect for the law, a new scale of values in which crimes are not so bad if the ideology of its beneficiaries is right.

But, if that moral option was in the eyes of João Moreira Sales the intimate justification for the occultation of a criminal, what other reason could there be, in the eyes of Mr. Soares, for the occultation of the occultation?

There are only three hypotheses. One, disregard and accommodation: Mr. Soares, as acting sub-secretary of security, thought that a fleeing criminal was none of his business. Two, some egotistic motive: money, to help a friend, the exchange of favors. Third, an ideological option: Mr. Soares believed that the transformation of a regular thug in a terrorist and guerrilla-fighter was a moral enterprise of high value to which he should lend a hand.

Mr. Soares would find the first two hypotheses an abomination. Being a man of manners, a so-called 'intellectual', he would never do anything as vulgar as protecting a 'regular thug', which deserves only the despise of a conscious revolutionary. So, what he finds worthy of protection is the criminal who has been indoctrinated, trained and armed to kill for a political cause which is the same as his. What a coincidence that the Zapatistas, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro and the FARC all share the same cause.

The presence of Mr. Soares as National Secretary of Public Security is therefore a promise that the good days of vulgar criminality are over: all criminals without ideology belong in jail. I dare not ask where the others do belong. Mexico, perhaps? I don't think so. Who would go so far when training can be obtained at home, with FARC specialists hired to elevate the technical level of violence in the slums of Rio?

Olavo de Carvalho is a philosopher and the author of several books, including O Imbecil Coletivo: Atualidades Inculturais Brasileiras (1996) and O Futuro do Pensamento Brasileiro - Estudos sobre o Nosso Lugar no Mundo (1997). He writes for three very influential dailies in Brazil: Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo (from Rio) and Zero Hora (from Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul). His articles can be found at www.olavodecarvalho.org and www.midiasemmascara.org To reach him write to [email protected]