Since the far right snatched the limelight and votes from the traditional right and centre, politics has lost what made coexistence possible: the mediation between what is felt and what can actually be said, proposed and finally carried out. Subtlety, touch and rhetoric have for centuries been the essence of what was called “the art of politics”. Even in the recent past, several politicians from different parts of the world lost their mandates for having been caught confessing desires and misdeeds that are unacceptable in ordinary life. That is over now. As Donald Trump demonstrates, one can plan a coup d’état and still run in the next election with a chance of winning in what boasts of being “the greatest democracy in the world”. However, there are few parliaments capable of embodying this radical change in such an obscene way as the Brazilian Congress.
In June, the Chamber of Deputies approved an urgent vote on a bill that equated abortion after 22 weeks of gestation to the crime of homicide, even in the three cases in which it is permitted in Brazil: rape, risk of death for the woman and anencephalic pregnancy. In practice, if the bill were approved, women who abort would face a higher sentence than their rapist: 20 years in prison. The vote on the bill was only (temporarily) removed from the agenda because a part of society rose up and took to the streets with banners reading: “Girls are not mothers. Rapists are not fathers.” In Brazil, six out of ten raped women are under 14 years old.
The Lula da Silva government and the centre-left Workers’ Party have barely reacted to the horror of the proposal. The reason, according to analysts, is that, without a majority in Congress, the government is sacrificing the “agenda of customs” to get the “economic agenda” approved.
It is time to realize that this division between “customs” and economics is false. Rape is the crime that reveals the core of this falsehood. Rape is not about sex. It has never been about sex. Rape is about power. Power over the bodies of women and all minorities who do not fit in.
The parliamentarians who are putting together bills to subjugate women’s bodies are the same ones who have destroyed and are destroying environmental legislation. The logic that destroys women’s bodies is the same one that destroys the body of nature. It is worth remembering the anthological phrase of the right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro in 2019, his first year as president, when he complained about the interest of Europeans in the Amazon: the forest “is the virgin that all the perverts from outside want.”
The Lula government, despite the resistance of ministers such as Marina Silva, of Environment and Climate Change, defends the opening of a new front for oil exploitation in the Amazon, as well as roads and railways that will destroy the forest and its people. Its failure to act in response to the bill that would turn raped women into murderers reveals much more than political pragmatism. Rape is the greatest expression of patriarchy, which, closely intertwined with capitalism and colonialism, has led the planet to global warming and threatens the survival of new generations. Rape and climate collapse are closely connected. Without understanding this connection, it will be impossible to deal with the extreme phenomena that multiply and worsen every year while large corporations, governments and the parliaments that serve them continue to violate the body of nature.
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