Historical facts do not repeat themselves, but they can rhyme, like the verses of a long poem. I heard this phrase from my friend Sidney Chalhoub, a prestigious historian and professor at Harvard University. I also read a similar statement in one of the talks by Tia Lydia, the hateful villain from the novels "The Maiden's Tale" and "The Wills" by Canadian Margaret Atwood, who describes the horrors of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy imposed by force in some of U.S. states.
Undoubtedly, the rise of the extreme right in Brazil in the wake of Operation Lava Jato rhymes quite nicely with the rise of the extreme right in Italy after Operation Mani Pulite. And, both rhyme with the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe in the 1930s.
Under the "excuse" that he was eradicating corruption in the Italian state, Mani Pulite destroyed the political elite with the help of the local hegemonic media, contradictorily paving the way for the corrupt, authoritarian, and immoral Silvio Berlusconi to become Italy's prime minister. These events, which occurred at the beginning of the 1990s, rhymed perfectly with Brazil during the second decade of the new millennium, when Operation Lava Jato passed over the democratic rule of law to -with the complicity of the hegemonic media- accuse part of the Brazilian political elite of corruption and serve as a basis for the immoral, authoritarian and corrupt Jair Bolsonaro to be elected President of the Republic in 2018.
