Time to go

THREE MONTHS after Mr Bolsonaro became president, he ordered the army to mark the 55th anniversary of the coup. His press office distributed a video in which a man explains that the 1960s were a “time of fear”. Communists were “killing their compatriots” in the name of a leftist ideology. The public took to the streets, begging for intervention. Then “Brazil remembered that it had an army.” Black and white shifts to colour as the music picks up and Brazil’s flag appears. “The army saved us,” the man says.

Brazil’s military dictatorship killed 434 people, far fewer than regimes in Argentina and Chile did. That partly explains how, after handing power back to a civilian government in 1985, the army became the institution Brazilians trust most. It is also why Mr Bolsonaro was able to exploit his military past to be elected.

The generals who joined his government hoped to advance the army’s agenda. Instead they hurt its reputation. They were complicit in Mr Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the pandemic, which led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. They failed to get him to sign vaccine contracts or to stop him greeting supporters when he caught covid-19. Under Mr Pazuello, the health ministry resembled a boca de fumo (drug den) for hydroxychloroquine. At one point it launched an app for doctors...