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The military intervention that Jair Bolsonaro promoted in Petrobras opened the language of the former aides of Paulo Guedes who had landed in the Ministry of Economy, silencing their resentments. The former secretary of bureaucratization, the economist Paulo Uebel, equated Bolsonaro with Dilma Rousseff. And he compared Guedes to the PT’s predecessor, Guido Mantega.
“Never has the Bolsonaro government been so similar to Dilma’s government as it is today,” Uebel wrote on a social network. “At that time, Guido Mantega would do absolutely the same thing as Paulo Guedes. This similarity should make any good citizen tremble! We cannot give up on Brazil.”
Uebel surrendered with the government six months ago. He was responsible for the administrative reform, which remained in Bolsonaro’s drawer for a year before being sent to Congress. He withdrew along with businessman Salim Mattar, the former Secretary of Privatizations who was frustrated at not being able to sell state companies.
Like Uebel, Salim also expressed his outrage at the change of command at Petrobras on a social network. Roberto Castello Branco – a man from Guedes – leaves, and General Joaquim Silva y Luna enters – who follows Pazuello’s model of administration: “One commands, the other obeys.”
“One more day, I disagree and outraged the leadership of Brazil,” Salim wrote. “This new interference in Petrobras only confirms that it is necessary to privatize ALL state companies and, thus, reduce the size of the state.”
At the tip of the pencil, Guedes lost something like 15 assistants. In August last year, when Uebel and Salim called the removal truck, the minister was forced to admit that his portfolio was living with a “stampede.”
Taken by words, other members of the economic team may leave the government. The only difference between the economists who defected and those who remain in Guedes’ trench is that the defectors do not need to pretend to trust Bolsonaro’s conversion to liberalism.
Without twisting his tongue, Paulo Uebel identifies a bit of electoral populism in Bolsonaro’s aversion to Petrobras’ pricing policy. “State companies should not be used to generate votes. This violates the principles of public administration and is contrary to good governance practices. Unfortunately this episode!”
For Uebel, Castello Branco lost favor with Bolsonaro “for doing the right job: protecting a state company against political use, against populism.”
The evocation of Dilma and Mantega gives an idea of the level of frustration of the economists that Guedes recruited for his team. Under Dilma there was an economic ruin in which ineptitude was mixed with the absence of government.
At that time, the Economy portfolio was called the Ministry of Finance. Mantega simply adorned the chair. Dilma was the minister. When Bolsonaro declared that he had found a Posto Ipiranga to feed his economic ignorance, he imagined that the president would give his minister a heavy hand.
When comparing his former boss to Mantega, Paulo Uebel says aloud what the survivors of the economic team whisper between four walls: Paulo Guedes takes his belief in the fable of super-administration too far.
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