Problem

Brazilian president-elect Jair Bolsonaro campaigned on a promise ''to kill at least 30.000 people'' for a start at improving Brazil. He promised to arm a populace of urban supporters frustrated about crime, as well as rural lords and members of the Evangelical Church, goading the land into vigilanteism: a recipe for chaos. Ironically, his ''penal populism'' and call to arms recalls the clashes in Brazil that begun in the late 1960s and eventually degenerated into the drug-wars. 
Jair Bolsonaro actively campaigned for the elimination of democracy and all public institutions; has stated a willingness to dissolve parliament and to overrule the judiciary. His first step in that direction is the nomination of Judge Sergio Moro as Justice Minister: clearly this constitutes tampering with the Separation of Powers that upholds the fabric of the system of parliamentary democracy.
Jair Bolsonaro likely owes his presidential election to Judge Moro, who motored the judicial media-spectacle around the imprisonment of the nation's favourite potential candidate for the 2018 elections, Ignacio Lula Da Silva of the wounded PT Worker's Party. A popular slogan before the elections began was ''Eleiçao sem Lula e Fraude'' (an election without Lula means fraud) 
The military already raided Brazilian universities confiscating books and materials on Fascism, in the name of a ''battle against ideologies.'' Jair Bolsonaro's rise follows the recent burning of the 200 year old Brazilian National Museum in Río, a city then under military rule: the parallel to the Reichstag sets the stage for his morbid farce.On a continent suffering from rampant police corruption, Bolsonaro campaigned to end all investigations into police misconduct. The Brazilian police committed an estimated 5000 homicides in the year 2017 alone (source: HispanTV) apparently an unsatisfactory cipher for the Partido Social Liberal. What will be the fate of courts, judges, investigators and lawyers who run afoul of the ''hands off the police'' policy? 
According to Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Safatle, Bolsonaro owes his success largely to his stubborn avoidance of issues, a highly organized ''fake news'' campaign that used whatsapp and other digital means to defame the opposition; not to mention his having deliberately eluded any open debate with the opposition during elections. Actual debate may have revealed the newly anointed administration's position on national healthcare and universal public education in Brazil, as well as the national industries. Brazil seems an anomaly and exception in the market-fundamentalist world order. Bolsonaro promises to integrate Brazil into the post-liberal, market fundamentalist financial system, despite the proven inefficacy of that method becoming more apparent the world over. He wants to do so first by eradicating public university and public healthcare, despite the enormous popularity these institutions enjoy among the mass of Brazilians, and despite the consequences in a poor country vulnerable to epidemics. Bolsonaro has avoided declaring his least popular positions (the economic ''shock doctrine'', unlimited privatisation) while fixating on the public annoyance and religious opprobrium toward gay marriage and the youth's identity politics. He promises to offer Brazil as a colony to help boost Trump's project of protectionism at home whilst engaging in plunder overseas (''America first.") He shares Trump's flatulent disregard for the natural world order (the environment, climate) preferring a decadent economic and military global order.

The Threat of ''Bolsonaro-ism'' in the region
Bolsonaro's statement that ''the sole mistake of the dictatorship was to torture without executing the tortured'' and his emphasis of the figure ''30.000'' clearly refers to his admiration for the Argentinean Videla regime, which outdid all other Latin American dictatorships of the period after it seized state power, enacting 30,000 disappearances of detained and tortured, the majority of them youths. Brazil's military junta, by comparison, executed relatively few, prompting Bolsonaro's sole self-critique. He resonates with Argentinean and Chilean sympathizers in nostalgia for dictatorship. In 2016, Argentina's then-Minister of Culture Darío Lopérfido made public statements insisting that ''there were no 30,000 disappeared in Argentina, more like 3000'' while the Mauricio Macri administration sought to criminalize and persecute the May Plaza mothers among other human rights organizations and successfully shut down media organizations, channels and newspapers with a non-government message (such as the Buenos Aires Herald.) 
Steve Bannon has stated his support and intimacy with the Bolsonaro family, and claims to have helped develop Boslonaro's recipe for success.Though Bannon criticizes the Macri regime for surrendering the country to the IMF, it is clear the Macri phenomenon in Argentina set a precedent for the Bolsonaro phenomenon.
Until now, mainstream condemnation has avoided critique of Macri, because of his willingness to integrate with the deteriorating centrist establishments and the global financial system. Yet Argentina's National Security Chief, Patricia Bullrich,
recently echoed Bolsonaro's rhetoric, advising Argentineans to arm themselves with rifles against thieves and to engage in a battle of all against all.

Let us not only call for international pressure upon Bolsonaro. Let us also seek to dissuade those who wish to repeat the phenomenon whilst facilitating Bolsonaro-ism in the region. Earlier this year, both the Argentine president and the Chief of National Security Patricia Bullrich awarded a medal to policeman Luis Chocobar, after having shot a young student demonstrator in the back at a protest. The Argentine administration now looks Northward, hopeful to support the more radical and more popular right-wing party ruling their most influential neighbour, regional superpower Brazil.

International bodies sending an effective signal against ''Bolsonaro-ism'' in the region becomes more urgent.

Isolate the dangerous phenomenon of ''Bolsonaro-ism'' in the region, with international pressure and a call for sanctions such as those which already are in place against Caracas.

Will Bolsonaro break the Geneva Convention when dealing with neighbouring states that reject his ideology? While Latin American military schools of the later 20th century traditionally admired the strategies of Erwin Rommel during the Second World War and insisted that Hitler's Blitzkriegs were ''excessively messy'' or mere ''strategic blunders'', it appears Bolsonaro by contrast admires the blitzkrieg tactic, judging from public statements he made such as ''you got to admit that Adolf Hitler was a great military strategist'', placing the former army captain to the right of the previous consensus among Latin American military circles. 

Solution
Time to call for European Union sanctions on Brazil, and to threaten sanctions on any of the illiberal governments within Mercosur that declare an intention of collaboration with Bolsonaro. Sanctions must be declared in the name of concern for human rights, in the name of regional peace and stability, and for global climate change, for Bolsonaro's threat to the Amazon jungles also threatens a major source of our oxygen among countless other resources vital for our survival of the eco- crisis. 
Brazilian journalist and activist Bruno Torturra, founder and editor of the Studio Fluxo journalism platform, in a recent interview on the program ''Democracy Now'' stressed the need for an international campaign of pressure on the Brazilian government. Now that Brazil's young democratic institutions stand more weakened than ever before, foreign support and solidarity is needed, partially in economic pressure against the regime with its clearly stated intent to commit massacres (the cynical ''30,000 minimum'') as well as economic support for alternative media and journalism outside of the O Globo monopoly that has clearly supported Bolsonaro.
We call for EU sanctions on Brazil and on any bordering Mercosur country that collaborates in atrocities or demonstrates a refusal to isolate Brazil.

The official nostalgia for the 1970s dictatorships in the region remind us of the state terror campaigns of that period. Campaigns for international pressure during the 1970s played a crucial role in making the generals abdicate and resign; the pressure first came from Europe, especially after the disappearance in Argentina of Swedish citizen Dagmar Hagelin led to her father Ragner Hagelin's international campaign. Then Jimmy Carter's sanctions followed suit. We must learn from history without first allowing atrocities similar to those of the past to have their resurgence today.