MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bolsonaro sons aim at the pragmatic vice-president Mourao calling him “traitor”

Mourao's more pragmatic approach on foreign affairs and hot-button cultural issues has drawn the ire of the president’s hard line conservative advisers

A barrage of criticism this week from the sons of Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro aimed at the vice president has laid bare stark divisions in his cabinet, raising serious concerns from senior members of his four-month-old government.

Allegedly the retired military officers who make up a third of Bolsonaro’s 21-member cabinet fear the attacks on Vice President Hamilton Mourao, a former general, are threatening to derail an uphill effort to pass the president’s economic reform agenda.

“We are wasting time. The economy is at a standstill, unemployment is increasing and people are discussing such nonsense,” a senior official in the government said.

Bolsonaro’s sons Carlos and Eduardo, among the president’s four sons and a daughter from three marriages, have accused Mourao of disloyalty and criticized him on social media and in the press.

Mourao is the most outspoken of the former generals in Brazil’s government. His more pragmatic approach on foreign affairs and hot-button cultural issues has drawn the ire of the president’s hard line conservative advisers – including his sons.

Even for a country with a long history of political dynasties, the unprecedented influence of the president’s family and open sparring with a formal adviser have stymied observers.

“Political clans have held sway in Brazilian state politics, but we have never seen a family dominate the federal government this way before, or attack the vice president like this,” said Carlos Couto, a politics professor at think tank FGV.

Carlos dos Santos Cruz, a former general in a cabinet-level position overseeing communications and congressional relations, downplayed the divisions in the government and chalked the clamor up to a new media environment.

“The internet is an open channel. It’s different from when you had traditional media and the campaign ended,” he said. “Now the campaign continues. Everyone keeps debating, fighting, criticizing. Those that helped in the campaign think they can keep giving their opinion in the government.”

Carlos Bolsonaro, a Rio de Janeiro city councilman behind the social media campaign that helped to elect his father, unloaded on Mourao via Twitter this week, questioning his loyalty and conservatism in nearly a dozen posts.

“Mourao the traitor?” was the title of one video he retweeted. Another post criticized Mourao for saying that the Venezuelan opposition should not be armed because a civil war there would be “horrible for the Southern Hemisphere.”

When asked about the tweets, Carlos Bolsonaro simply said: “I’m not attacking anyone, they are just things that happened that I would like to keep sharing with friends!”

Mourao and his allies have pushed back against sharp policy shifts proposed by Eduardo Bolsonaro, a lawmaker advising his father on foreign affairs, and Foreign Minister Ernesto de Araujo, who have pushed for Brazilian diplomacy to hew closer to the U.S. line on Venezuela, Israel and China.

Mourao dismissed the idea of a military intervention in Venezuela’s political crisis, floated by U.S. President Donald Trump, after a White House news conference where Bolsonaro did not rule out the possibility.

He also urged Bolsonaro not to move Brazil’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, as the United States did, because it would threaten Arab markets for billions of dollars of halal meat exports.

Business leaders praised Mourao for working to strengthen ties with China after Bolsonaro railed on the campaign trail against Chinese investors.

That moderating influence and centrist appeal have enraged presidential advisers who see Mourao undercutting Bolsonaro’s conservative turn in favor of his own presidential ambitions.

Asked if the social media attacks on the vice president were a distraction, Eduardo Bolsonaro flipped the question: “What’s causing a lot of noise are the successive declarations by the vice president in contradiction of the president of the republic,” he told newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo. “If he is a soldier for the president, then things will fall into place.”