Security law being used to target critics of Brazil's president

In Bazil, Police  are starting to employ a dictatorship-era national security law against critics of President Jair Bolsonaro, while lawyers and activists rally to provide them with legal help and accuse the government of trying to silence dissent. On Friday, demonstrators challenged police in the capital by parading with anti-Bolsonaro signs a day after four protesters were detained. They had called the president “genocidal” for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and displayed a cartoon depicting him next to a Nazi swastika. Officers took no action Friday as about 40 people protested for an hour.

The national security law, which dates from 1983, near the end of the country's military dictatorship, makes it a crime to harm the heads of the three branches of government or expose them to danger. The vague measure has recently been used to detain or investigate Bolsonaro critics. There have been previous news-making charges against prominent critics of the president, including a newspaper columnist, a political cartoonist and a popular YouTube star, but the law is increasingly being employed against ordinary citizens. Courts haven't upheld any of the arrests so far, but lawyers are expressing alarm that the tactic is becoming commonplace.

Demonstrations in Brasilia called for Bolsonaro’s impeachment due to his administration’s alleged failings in the pandemic, which has caused almost 290,000 deaths in Brazil. The country has reported nearly 3,000 deaths each day this week. The cases appear to almost entirely target Bolsonaro’s critics, human rights organizations and activists say. Federal police have conducted more than 80 investigations under the security law during Bolsonaro's first two years, and more than 10 in the first 45 days of 2021, according to the newspaper O Globo. The yearly average before the conservative leader took office was 11.