Good national customs owe a great part of the Evangelical bench in the Chamber a great service. It stopped the plot that intended to legalize gaming in Pindorama.
At first glance, there was just a trick by Chamber's president, Arthur Lira, taking to the Plenary in the dark of Brasília an old project, which legalizes gaming and allows the reopening of casinos, or so-called resorts.
The filet mignon and the poison pot of this initiative are at the opening of the casinos. Behind a fundraising and tourist panacea, there is much more.
The facts:
In May 2018, entering the kitchen of Copacabana Palace, presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro and economist Paulo Guedes met with American billionaire Sheldon Adelson. He came to Brazil with two objectives: to obtain the promise of setting up the Brazilian embassy in Jerusalem and to open up casinos in tourist cities. Adelson, a major backer of the Republican party in the United States, had casinos in Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau.
The tortoise walked. In December, the mayor of Rio, Marcelo Crivella, defended the creation of a hotel complex with a casino in Porto Maravilha. Months later, already in the Presidency of the Republic, Bolsonaro informed: "I don't want to go ahead here. Soon, you will be presented with a project which, with all due respect to Paulo Guedes, is expected to have more money in cash than the pension reform in ten years."
In the accounts of the tortoise's friends, the casinos could earn the Widow up to R$ 18 billion in revenue. Bolsonaro would have discussed the matter in one of his meetings with American President Donald Trump, owner of casinos in his land.
In November 2019, Minister Paulo Guedes came to the Window and praised the casinos in Las Vegas: "Can you imagine having the same in the Amazon region? Mystery, tourism, entertainment and a world center for sustainable energy." Other princes of pocketbook circulated the world gaming circuit and Adelson's office.
At the famous April 2020 ministry meeting, the resort theme reappeared in its vestal guise of tourism. It was countered by the terribly evangelical minister Damares Alves: "Pact with the devil."
Damares vocalized a position rooted in the evangelical milieu that does not drink, smoke or gamble. The subject could have died, but Paulo Guedes took it up again:
"There's no problem. They are billionaires, they are millionaires. Executives from all over the world. (...) Tourism has gone from five million in Singapore to thirty million a year. Brazil receives six. (...) The dream of the president of transforming Rio de Janeiro into Cancún there, Angra dos Reis in Cancún (...) It's a business center. It's only of legal age. The guy goes in, leaves money there that he earned the day before yesterday, he leaves it there, drinks, come out of life happy. Thy don't bother anyone. Let each one fuck as they want. Damares. Damares. Damares. Leave each one. Mainly if the guy is legal age, vaccinated and a billionaire. Let the guy fuck himself! There's no... there's none, there's no Brazilian.”
No one would have imagined that this would be the level of a doctor's debate at the University of Chicago, but it was.
The April discussion became public and the project continued its journey through the dark of Brasília. If a part of the evangelical bench had kept quiet, Arthur Lira would have put on the agenda the legalization of casinos. With the reaction, he approved the urgency, but undertook to only put the project's merits to a vote from February. Until then, as the roulette croupier says: Place your bets, gentlemen.
Sheldon Adelson will have to wait. He died last January, aged 87, leaving something like USD30 billion.
Elio Gaspari
Journalist, author of five volumes on the history of the military regime, including "A Ditadura Encurralada" (The Cornered Dictatorship).
