Brazil

[Magda Hassan]

Not going to be good. Already the military are raiding libraries and universities and removing books on fascism because they say it is electoral propaganda. Bolsonaro has just been elected. He thinks Pinochet was a pussy. Is fine with torture, rape, killing gays and refugees. Good bye Amazon rain forest. He doesn't believe in science. Doesn't even pretend to understand it. Finance markets sees an opportunity.

[Peter Lemkin]

Not going to be good. Already the military are raiding libraries and universities and removing books on fascism because they say it is electoral propaganda. Bolsonaro has just been elected. He thinks Pinochet was a pussy. Is fine with torture, rape, killing gays and refugees. Good bye Amazon rain forest. He doesn't believe in science. Doesn't even pretend to understand it. Finance markets sees an opportunity.

Shit! I was afraid of this.....this guy is worse than Trump....Lula will not get out of jail and all good people, women, blacks [of which there are many many in Brazil], progressives, indigenous, lefties, gays, and the poor are in for a very difficult time - to start immediately - apparently. It is where the USA is headed if we don't do something fast. Magda is correct, this also spells the end of the Amazon for its people and its ecosystem. There is a concerted effort worldwide to head toward fascism. These are very dark days indeed! In Brazil it was mostly done by total control of the MSM.

[Peter Lemkin]

as we turn to Brazil, where a far-right former Army officer who openly supports dictatorships and torture has been overwhelmingly elected president. Jair Bolsonaro's election marks the most radical political shift in Brazil since military rule ended more than 30 years ago. He won 55 percent of the vote, easily defeating Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers' Party.
Bolsonaro campaigned on a promise to end corruption and crack down on crime, but many fear the future of democracy in Brazil is in danger. For decades, Bolsonaro has openly praised the country's former military dictatorship, once saying the dictatorship should have killed 30,000 more people. He also has a history of making racist, misogynistic, homophobic comments, has spoken in favor of torture, has threatened to destroy, imprison or banish his political opponents. He has also encouraged the police to kill suspected drug dealers, once told a female lawmaker she was too ugly to rape. He also said he would rather hear that his son had died in a car accident than learn that his son is gay. On Sunday night, Jair Bolsonaro claimed he would help liberate Brazil.

PRESIDENT-ELECT JAIR BOLSONARO: [translated] You are my witness that I will be an advocate for defending the constitution, for democracy, for freedom. This is my promise. It's not one of a political party. It's not the word of a man. It's an oath to God. … We will liberate Brazil and the Foreign Ministry from the ideology of its international relations that it's subjected Brazil to in recent years. Brazil will no longer be different from the countries of the developed world. We will seek bilateral relations that add to the economic and technological value of Brazilian products. We will restore international respect for our dear Brazil.

AMY GOODMAN: Thousands of protesters poured into the streets of São Paulo and other cities in Brazil to protest Bolsonaro's election.

PROTESTER: [translated] I am in mourning, not for me, but for Brazil, which doesn't deserve this. It doesn't deserve this ignorance. The Brazilian people are ignorant. Brazil owes a lot to Lula.

AMY GOODMAN: Jair Bolsonaro directly benefited from the jailing of the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had been leading all presidential polls earlier this year. He has been in jail since April on what many consider trumped-up corruption charges to prevent him from running for president. Bolsonaro will be sworn in January 1st, 2019.
Just moments ago, President Trump tweeted, "Had a very good conversation with the newly elected President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who won his race by a substantial margin. We agreed that Brazil and the United States will work closely together on Trade, Military and everything else! Excellent call, wished him congrats!"
To discuss the implications of Bolsonaro's victory, we go to Rio de Janeiro to speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.
Glenn, welcome back. Your response to Bolsonaro's victory?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think it's really important to put it into its proper context. For a long time, the Western media was referring to him as "Brazil's Trump." That's how he was marketing himself. The reality is much different. He's by far the most extremist leader now elected anywhere in the democratic world. He's far closer, as we've discussed before, to Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, or even General Sisi, the dictator of Egypt. A journalist, Vincent Bevins, based for a long time in Brazil and now in Indonesia, has made the argument that he's far more extreme than Duterte.
I think that the key thing to understand about Bolsonaro is that he really comes not from this modern "alt-right" movement of the type of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen, but the Cold War far right that carried out enormous atrocities in the name of fighting domestic communism, which is what Bolsonaro believes his primary project to be. He recently vowed to cleanse the country of left-wing opposition, which he sees as a communist front.
And so, the threat and the ideology is far more extreme than anything in the democratic world. But the dynamics as far as why he won are quite similar, in that it was driven not by a sudden far-right ideology conversion on the part of this population in Brazil, but anger and desperation and hopelessness about the failures of the establishment class.
AMY GOODMAN: During an interview with a Brazilian television program back, oh, like almost 20 years ago, Jair Bolsonaro said, "Through the vote you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! It will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do. Killing some 30,000, starting with FHC [then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso], not kicking them out, killing! If some innocent people are going to die, fine, in any war innocents die." Talk about his stances, Glenn Greenwald, on many issues, from LGBTQ issues to women's rights, etc.
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, that's why I say he's a real throwback to the kind of far-right movements of, say, the '60s, '70s and '80s than he is this more updated, modernized version. So, if you look at far-right leaders throughout the West, you don't really see much of a focus on, say, abortion and LGBT issues. If anything, sometimes the far right in Europe coopts those issues as a way of inciting xenophobia against Muslims, saying Muslims are regressive and want to drag the country back thousands of years in terms of social issues. Whereas Bolsonaro is kind of this much more old-school fascist, where a major part of his campaign was depicting LGBTs as a direct threat to children, saying that the reason LGBTs want to infiltrate public schools is because they want to convert people's children into being gay so that they can have sex with theman obviously highly inflammatory claim to make about a marginalized population in a society that's already pretty conservative on social issues.
But the much graver threat is the fact that he explicitly reveres and wants to replicate the worst elements of the military dictatorship. When he stood up, very recently, in 2016 on the floor of the Congress and voted to impeach Dilma Rousseff, he specifically said he was doing it in honor of the notorious colonel who tortured not only dissidents in general, but Dilma specifically. So this is the kind of regime he wants to reinstate. Whether he'll be able to do that is a looming question, but that's definitely his intention.
AMY GOODMAN: Foreign Policy has a headline, "Jair Bolsonaro's Model Isn't Berlusconi. It's Goebbels." Glenn?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah. I mean, that's what I think the Western media is only now starting to come to grips with, is that he really isn't even placeable on the standard ideological spectrum that has come to define even this new right movement that has obviously succeeded in the U.S. and the U.K., with Brexit, and is flourishing in many places in Western and Eastern Europe. He's far more extreme than that.
Whether Nazi comparisons and the like are healthy or productive is something I'd prefer to leave to the side, because that tends, just generally, to obfuscate. I prefer to use Nazi analogies for people who have actually committed genocide. But I think that the threat that he poses to just basic human rights, the right of dissent and the ability to have an ongoing viable democracy can't be overstated.
AMY GOODMAN: And President Trump applauding him, the significance and the importance of the U.S.-Brazilian relationship, Glenn?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think that we all know now how President Trump sees the world, which is in this very simplistic framework where people who say good things about him are people that he likes and people who say bad things about him are people that he hates. And Jair Bolsonaro is somebody who has consciously modeled himself on Donald Trump. His children, when they came to New York, met with Steve Bannon. TrumpBolsonaro himself has saluted the American flag and talked about how much he loves the United States under Trump. I'm sure he was very effusive in his praise of Trump when he spoke to him, and therefore Trump's current posture, in his childlike manner, is to view Jair Bolsonaro as somebody that is an ally and a friend and somebody worthy of praise for that reason alone.

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Brazil to look at the implications of the election of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former Army captain who won 55 percent of the vote in Sunday's election, easily defeating Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers' Party in a runoff. Many fear Brazil's young democracy is now at risk. Bolsonaro has often praised Brazil's former military dictatorship, which ended just 33 years ago. He has also spoken in favor of torture and threatened to destroy, imprison or banish his political opponents.
Bolsonaro has vowed to fill his Cabinet with many military officers once he takes the reins of the presidency on January 1st. His vice president, Antônio Hamilton Mourão, is a four-star general who just retired from active duty in February. Former General Augusto Heleno is expected to become Bolsonaro's minister of defense.
There's also growing fear that Brazil could move militarily against Nicolás Maduro's government in Venezuela. On Monday, a newspaper in Brazil quoted an unnamed high-ranking official from the Colombian government saying that if Bolsonaro, quote, "wants to topple Maduro with a military intervention, he will have Colombia's support."
AMY GOODMAN: Bolsonaro has announced he also wants Sérgio Moro to serve as justice minister. Moro is the judge who convicted the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a controversial corruption case that prevented Lula from running for president, though, when he was running, before he went to prison, he was the most popular candidate.
On the economic front, Jair Bolsonaro has tapped an economist who was taught at the University of Chicago to oversee his economic plan, which includes slashing pensions and the mass privatization of many state-run companies. The economist, Paulo Guedes, once taught at the University of Chile during the reign of General Augusto Pinochet.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has alarmed environmentalists by vowing to merge the ministries of agriculture and the environment as part of his move to industrialize the Amazon and open it to more agribusiness and mining. Amazon Watch has described Bolsonaro's plan as reckless, saying it will bring untold destruction to the planet's largest rainforest and the communities who call it home, and spell disaster for the global climate.
Human rights groups are also alarmed over Bolsonaro's past comments about women and the LGBT community. He once told a female lawmaker she was too ugly to rape. He also said he would rather hear that his son had died in a car crash than learn his son is gay.
For more, we are joined by two guests. Bruno Torturra is a journalist and photographer, founder and editor of Studio Fluxo, an independent media outlet based in São Paulo, Brazil. He also founded the Brazilian digital collective Media Ninja. James Green is professor of Brazilian history and culture at Brown University, past president of the Brazilian Studies Association here in the United States, author of several books, including We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Bruno Torturra, let's begin with you in São Paulo. Your response to the election of Bolsonaro, who won by quite a margin. Why? And what do you think?
BRUNO TORTURRA: Well, it's hard to overstate, Amy, the significance of his election to such a young and fragile democracy such as ours. I think he won for several reasons. It's very difficult to pinpoint just a single one. But I think it's the result of many, many years of a criminalization of the political class in Brazil. This is a long time coming. It started with big operations that the police, the federal police and the judiciary did in Brazil. But the fact is, many saw this coming, but the political establishment couldn't believe it was possible.
Bolsonaro also represents the military dictatorship nostalgia in the country, which is pretty strong. But I also have to say something that not many people put on the table, which is, there is a mass psychology thing happening here in Brazil. There is the fact that the left in Brazil is being criminalized and demonized for quite a while. So Bolsonaro is the result of many, many things. It's hard to pinpoint just one reason.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor James Green, I'd like to ask you, in terms of the impact of the Brazil elections, which did not get a whole lot of coverage here in the United States, on Latin America and, really, democracies across the world, because, people forget, Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world in population. It's got more people than Russia or Japan. And so, what happens in Brazil really has a big impact, certainly across Latin America, because it represents about half of all of South America's population.
JAMES GREEN: I think that the election in Brazil reflects an international trend that we've been following, in Russia, in the Philippines, in Poland, in Hungary, in the United States, and conservative governments that have come to power in Chile and Argentina and Paraguay. And the Bolsonaro government, which I would consider worse than the Trump administration, is probably going to be implementing a series of extremely reactionary changes to the country, which will see a decline in the standard of living for ordinary people, of working-class people, in addition to attacking the environment, tearing up international agreements, deforesting the Amazon region and challenging the democratic rights of LGBT community, the women, the black movement in Brazil, all of which have been fighting for the last 30 years for full democratic rights in the country.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, here in this country, I think a report said something like 75 percent of the Brazilian ex-patriots, around three-quarters of the Brazilian ex-patriots, voted for Bolsonaro, this former Army captain who praises the military dictatorship, attacks gays, attacks women, and then talks about the issues you do. Explain this, Professor Green.
JAMES GREEN: So, there's no question that there is popular support for Bolsonaro, who seems to be the savior for the country, who is going to offer simple solutions to very complex problems. His solution to increased violence or criminality is to arm all citizens. His solution to criticisms by human rights activists of the police excessive violence is to eliminate any investigations of police when they go into a community and shoot to kill.
In this regard, I think immigrants, people who have left the country in other moments, fall into the category of those in Brazil who are listening to these ideas that Bolsonaro has and hoping that they will solve very complex problems with his simple solutions. The community is very diverse in this country. I think there are a large number of Brazilians who have been very consistently supporting the fight for democracy in Brazil and have been very vocal, but they do remain a minority of the community in the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bruno Torturra, in terms of the racial and class implications of this election, clearly, undercertainly, under the Workers' Party, for the first time indigenous people and Afro-Brazilians started to have more rights and more attention in services and affirmative action from the government. What do you envision happening under Bolsonaro?
BRUNO TORTURRA: He's not the president yet, but if you follow the last couple of days here in Brazil, there is already violent attacks on indigenous peoples in the Amazon. And the fact is that this man made his political career inciting a very strong aspect of the Brazilian history, which is the oppression of theI'm sorry because I'm stuttering a lotthe oppression of the minorities in the country. And he unleashed, he authorized the military police in Brazil, which is very ideological to act, even if he's not giving the proper order. So, it's going to be hard. You know, it's going to be hard. It wasn't something that was unclear. And this dark aspect of the Brazilian spirit won the election. So, it's going to take a lot of organization and a lot of support from the international community to put
AMY GOODMAN: So, how areBruno, how are people organizing?
BRUNO TORTURRA: pressure on Brazil to stop this.
AMY GOODMAN: Bruno, how are people organizing? He has threatened to criminalize all activism in Brazil?
BRUNO TORTURRA: Yes. Yeah, he's saying this. He's saying this for quite a while. He's saying that he will put in prison, kill or send to the exile his opposition. And he said that he will put a final stop on all kind of activism. So, people are starting to reorganize. And we don't know yet what our response will be. Yesterday, there was the first peaceful protest to say that we won't stand this. And there was a lot of police brutality here in São Paulo. There were people who were arrested, people who were really beaten by the police, which I think will be the main problem here in Brazil. The military police has become an ideologicalan ideological militia and gave a lot of support to his election. And, you know, it's going to be hard times
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to
BRUNO TORTURRA: to be an activist here in Brazil, but we need it more than ever.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. Bruno Torturra is a journalist, photographer, founder and editor of the Studio Fluxo, an independent media outlet based in São Paulo, who faces very serious pressure. James Green, with us from Rhode Island, he's a professor of Brazilian history and culture at Brown University, past president of the Brazilian Studies Association. Among his books, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States. We'll be back with them in 30 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We're talking about the election of the far-right Army captain in Brazil right now, Jair Bolsonaro. Our guests, in São Paulo, Brazil, Bruno Torturra, journalist and photographer, founder and editor of Studio Fluxo, an independent media outlet based in São Paulo, also founded the Brazilian digital collective Media Ninja; and James Green is with us from Rhode Island, professor of Brazilian history and culture at Brown University, past president of the Brazilian Studies Association. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Professor Green, I'd like to ask youyou're an expert on the history of Brazil, especially the period of the military dictatorship, that most young people in America today have no knowledge of. And clearly, this past election, not only is Bolsonaro talking about bringing many military into his Cabinet, there were about 20 military officers that were elected to the Brazilian Congress, as well. And could you talk about the role of the military in Brazil in the past, especially in light of the fact that many right-wing governments begin as elected governments? And we've seen that, whether it was Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy. They were elected to office initially and then seized power using the strength of the military, as well.
JAMES GREEN: So, if we have, in this country and around the world, Holocaust deniers, who deny the existence of the Holocaust, Bolsonaro is a dictatorship denier. He denies that there was a military dictatorship in the country. He denies that it was censorship. And actually, when he admits there had been torture, he argues that instead of torturing people during the military regime that was in power from 1964 to '85, they should have killed all opponents of the government. He defends the use of torture today. And if he could do so, I would assume he would try to implement the practice as a constant pattern against political oppositionists. Now, we have to keep in mind that the police have consistently used torture and violent means against poor people, especially people of color in Brazil, as part of their police enforcement.
The military came to power in 1964, overthrowing a popularly elected government who was trying to carry out a series of minor reforms or moderate reforms, and promised to clean house and leave office within six months to a year, and they ended up staying in power for 21 years and carried out severe or gross violations of human rights, which were documented and clearly pointed out by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and other international organizations.
So, we're facing a person who believes in the military, was a captain in the militaryalthough he was retired forcibly from the military for being insubordinatewho believes in authoritarian policies. And we're expecting him to strengthen the role of the military in the country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And wasn't
JAMES GREEN: I think one of the concerns of many ofyes?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and wasn't one of the requirements of the return to democracy that the military insisted that there would be no attempt to seek justice for those who participated in the tortures and the killings during the dictatorship?
JAMES GREEN: So, in 1979, as part of a negotiated kind of agreement between sectors of the opposition and the military regime, an amnesty law was passed, which released some political prisoners and allowed some exiles to return. But it also barred any prosecution of anyone involved, by the state, in gross violation of human rights. Now, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and the Inter-American Human Rights Court have declared that you cannot grant an amnesty for people who have committed crimes against humanity or gross violations of human rights. But unfortunately, the Brazilian Supreme Court has declared that the amnesty law is valid. So, basically, we have had a dictatorship of 21 years in which hundreds of people were killed and thousands of people were tortured, including former President Dilma Rousseff, and the military has never been punished for the crimes they've committed. And so, this has given them a notion of superiority and invulnerability and the possibility of coming into the government with impunity.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read a quote of Jair Bolsonarothis is from like 1999speaking on Brazilian television. He said, "Through the vote you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! It will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do. Killing some 30,000 [people], starting with FHC [then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso], not kicking them out, killing! If some innocent people are going to die, fine, in any war innocents die." Which brings us back to Bruno. Most people, after an election, when your side loses, you just organize, you know, for the next election and try to lay a groundwork. Are you actually afraid, and other journalists and activists afraid, for your life right now? How are you preparing?
BRUNO TORTURRA: It's hard to say, Amy. We are talking a lot about this. There are meetings happening all over the country now. But I think the people who are really in danger in Brazil, it's not people like me. It's people who live on the middle of the country, people who have to face the rural elites that have the support of the military police, and on the outskirts of the cities and on the favelas, which is where the police actually still are brutalizing people. It's important to say that even during the Workers' Party government here in Brazil, it's very hard to be an activist here. It's one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be an activist, especially if you live in the middle of the country, where there's no press, there's no journalism, and the police is veryare interlinked with the economic interests of the rural elites.
So, I think we have to talk a lot. We have to protect ourselves. And we have to call for the support of the whole world, actually. I think the only way to stop this man to become a dictator, which is his only intention, clearly, is that the world put economic and journalistic, political pressure here in Brazil, because we have very weak institutions. We have a media that is not well spread. And it's going to be very hard for the fragile and very discredited institutions here in Brazil to hold this man and his very broad political base that he built around himself.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I'd like to ask James Greenmeteorologist Eric Holthaus issued a dire warning on Twitter Sunday after Bolsonaro's election win. He wrote, quote, "This is worth repeating over and over. The most horrific thing Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has planned is privatization of the Amazon rainforest. With just 12yr remaining to remake the global economy and prevent catastrophic climate change, this is planetary suicide." I'm wondering your comments about the impact of Bolsonaro on Brazil's ecology and also the impact on the battle over climate change.
JAMES GREEN: This is a very serious issue. Bolsonaro built a coalition to come to power that included large agribusiness, which want to not only expand the deforestation of the Amazon to allow soybean and cattle production, but also to eliminate the protection of indigenous people living in the Amazon by stopping the guaranteeing of borders, of territories reserved for indigenous people.
And I must say that scholars, not just the environmentalists, around the world are very alarmed by this situation. In fact, there is a movement in the United States for thousands of academics to sign a statement alerting the Brazilian government that academics in this country and in Europe and around the world are going to be watching very closely the attacks on academic freedom, which is another important point to make out, because the government is really already clamping down on universities, which tend to be voices of clarity and warning about the dangers in the country. There's immediatethere's been immediate threat to academic freedom and university autonomy in the country. And we, as scholars who work on Brazil, in the United States and around the world
AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.
JAMES GREEN: are extremely alarmed.

[Magda Hassan]

Brazil has been lobotomised twice in the last two months. In the first lobotomy on 2 September, the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was burnt down, in a catastrophe directly attributable to the austerity policies of current president Michel Temer. The loss of over twenty million objects, including a 12,000-year-old human skeleton and recordings of songs from extinct Indigenous languages, constitutes an irreplaceable loss to the country's collective memory. I was there for the second lobotomy on 7 October, when the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro almost won an outright victory in the first round of the presidential elections.
International media have taken to calling Bolsonaro the Tropical Trump'. Trump is a venal troll with a mobster mentality, but it would be a stretch to call him a fascist. With Bolsonaro there need be no such qualms. In addition to his misogyny, racism and homophobia, Bolsonaro has openly praised Brazil's dictatorship, lavishing particular attention on its use of torture, and repeatedly promised to kill his opponents if given power. In the lead-up to the second-round vote that took place yesterday, I travelled across the country, conducting interviews with voters and political activists, while also collating maps of Brazil's demographics and voting trends, in an attempt to chart Bolsonaro's phenomenal ascent.


Brazil regions

For statistical purposes Brazil is divided by its government into five regions, each comprising three or more states. The vast Northern region (shown here in green), which contains more than half the Amazon rainforest, the centre-west region (yellow) and the Southern region (blue) have relatively low populations. The South-Eastern region (pink), is the most populous, with over forty per cent of the country's population and its two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The North-Eastern region (in orange) is the second most populous. Of Brazil's 210 million citizens, around 147 million are enrolled to vote.
I landed in Recife, in North-Eastern Brazil, a week before the first-round vote. The North-East has been a bastion of support for the centre-left Workers' Party since Lula's election in 2002. The day after my arrival, hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets across the country for the #elenão (Not Him') protests against Bolsonaro. Organised by women disgusted at Bolsonaro's misogyny, the march in Recife drew a large, energetic and diverse crowd, including a group of evangelical Christians declaring their support for human rights. This was a heartening sight, as Bolsonaro had been polling strongly with evangelicals. As the march approached Recife's old town, an ageing, beefed up Bolsominion (the term his opponents used to describe his more fanatical supporters) flapped a poster of his candidate from the roof of his opponent, striking a series of frenetic, pantomime Mussolini poses, much to the ire of the crowd below. An organiser told the marchers to move on, but a few moments later a loud explosion a block ahead plunged the street into darkness. It turned out to be an electrical fault rather than a Bolsominion bomb, and the march continued under the light of thousands of smartphones.
The next day at Boa Viagem beach in Southern Recife, I watched the Pro-Bolsonaro counter rally trundle by. In contrast to #elenão, most participants were in cars or on motorbikes, giving the appearance of an exuberant traffic jam. Brazilian flags waved overhead while an old white man in budgie smugglers danced on the curb to a Forro song with the following impishly vindictive lyrics:

Supporting Bolsonaro will leave the communists crazy
The wailing left call him homophobic but there are worst things than that
When the Leftists get worked up just throw them all in prison.

The whole event seemed underwhelming, but then the trickle of cars kept on coming. And coming. If there were this many Bolsonaro supporters in the staunchly leftist North-East, how many would there be in the country as a whole?


Cartogram (2014)


In the previous election in 2014, the Workers' Party candidate, Dilma Rousseff, was re-elected in a tight race against Aecio Neves of the right wing Social-Democratic Party (the names of Brazil's thirty-five registered parties rarely correspond to their ideologies). The cartogram above shows each municipality adjusted for population, and shows how elections are won and lost in the big coastal cities. In contrast to the US, the winning candidate must take fifty per cent plus one of the popular vote, rather than winning the highest number of states. Under the Brazilian system, Hillary Clinton would have won. In 2014, the Amazonian North (Dilma) and the Centre-West (Neves) cancelled each other out, while the North-East (Dilma) balanced out the strong Neves vote in the South and São Paulo. This left Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais as the crucial swing states. The Northern suburbs of Rio continued to back Dilma, reflecting continued support for the Workers' Party's mild redistributive policies such as the Bolsa Familia, a welfare program.


Income (2014)

In this sense 2014 was a relatively straightforward election where most voters supported their class interests. Voting choice closely matched income level, as seen in the map above. The wealthier south and centre-west backed Neves, the low tax, deregulation candidate, while the poorer North and North-East backed Dilma. Interestingly, this striking geographical division has only emerged since 2006, when class loyalties and oppositions to the Workers' Party began to crystallise after Lula's first term in power.
The Workers' Party was already drifting to the right, dealing with the post GFC recession by carrying out austerity measures that sparked massive protests in 2013. After Dilma's re-election renewed protests themselves took on a right-wing, middle-class flavour, as the Lava Jato investigation revealed endemic corruption throughout the political class. Dilma received the blame and was impeached in 2016, at which point her Vice President Michel Temer, from the ideologically amorphous PMDB, took power and implemented far more wide-ranging austerity measures. Ongoing scandals incriminated all major parties, with Bolsonaro managing to position himself as an outsider and change agent, despite facing corruption charges of his own during the campaign, including an illegally funded misinformation onslaught on Whatsapp. Lula returned to rescue the Workers' party, and was leading in the polls until his arrest and imprisonment on the basis that he may have been gifted a holiday house, and Bolsonaro now shot into the lead, ahead of the new Workers' Party candidate, Fernando Haddad.
On the day of the first-round vote, I visited a polling booth in Recife. Countless Bolsonaro supporters in Brazilian flag t-shirts were among the queues (My country is my party' was one of Bolsonaro's more resonant campaign slogans). A comparatively small number of Haddad supporters with red Free Lula' t-shirts could also be seen. They looked a little nervous.
In the south of the country, the wave of populist anger against the Workers' Party during the previous year had resulted in people with red clothing, and even bicycles, being beaten up in the street. A psychologist I spoke to in São Paulo at the time said she had never seen right-wing mob violence on this scale in Brazil before, during the dictatorship or since. After the polling station visit in Recife, I talked to three young, left-wing voters, one of whom was with her Bolsonaro supporting mother. The mother was in a jovial mood, constantly checking messages from whatsapp groups.
This article says Bolsonaro has already won with eighty per cent of the vote!'
Mum, it's 11AM, they've only just started counting. Who sent you that message anyway?'
My friend, she's very reliable.'
The other two voters were a gay couple, family friends of the mother and daughter. The mother was affectionate towards them, and at no stage did she express support for Bolsonaro's homophobia. She was more concerned about the crime rate.
We can't let human rights get in the way of stopping bandits! Human rights is just a cover!'
She'd voted for the right-wing candidate Neves in 2014, and had now switched to Bolsonaro and the far right. It was disturbing to hear a friendly, middle-aged woman repeating Bolsonaro's anti-human rights talking points Brazil's fragile democratic consensus, only established in the 1980s, was clearly under threat.


2014 versus 2018


When the results came in that night, the scale of the phenomenon became clear. The left of centre vote was split between Haddad and Ciro Gomes, another long-term operator running as a cleanskin candidate. In some ways the electoral map echoed 2014, but with massive gains for Bolsonaro across all regions outside the North-East.


19942018


The extent of the swing becomes even more striking if compared to previous elections since 1994. The last six presidential elections have been a two-horse race between the Workers' Party and the Social Democratic Party. The big shift of 2018 has been the collapse of the centre-right' vote and the lurch to the far right. Voter after voter told me that they wanted to see all the major party politicians replaced or jailed, including Neves, who has a reputation as a cocaine snorting sleazeball. But the Workers' Party, after 14 years in power, was receiving a large share of the opprobrium. The biggest direct swing from the Workers' Party to Bolsonaro was in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. In the latter, Bolsonaro received a shocking sixty per cent of the first-round vote. It was only his weak vote in the north-east that stopped Bolsonaro winning in the first round.
Numerous violent political attacks occurred in the immediate aftermath of the first-round vote. A 19-year-old woman wearing an #elenao sticker with a rainbow sign was attacked by a group of men, one of whom carved a swastika into her stomach. A police chief commenting on the case declared the symbol was not in fact a Nazi swastika, but a Buddhist symbol of peace. Why someone would want to carve a Buddhist symbol of love and harmony' into a teenager's midriff was left unclear. The rural bloc in congress, meanwhile, took the rightward shift as a chance to table draconian new rural labour laws that would effectively repeal the abolition of slavery'.


Deforestation


Alarmingly, Bolsonaro even won the Northern region. The map above shows that his support closely matched the arc of deforestation in the Amazon. Haddad received support in the more intact areas of the rainforest where Indigenous groups and other traditional communities have not yet been outnumbered by invading colonists.


Soybean plantations


Deforestation is working in favour of the far right. In areas where agribusiness dominates, Bolsonaro dominated the vote, as seen in this map showing the relationship of soy plantations locations to the 2018 results. However, Brazilian elections are won and lost on the coast, where other factors come into play.


Racial dot map


Given his regular racist outbursts, it could be assumed that Bolsonaro would receive greater support from white voters. The history of colonisation in Brazil led to a greater concentration of European migrants in the south of the country, contributing to the division in self-identified ethnicity seen in the map above. Bolsonaro's support among white' voters was indeed strikingly high he received 65 per cent of the first-round vote in the southern state of Santa Catarina. But he also broke even with Haddad amongst Pardo (mixed') and Preto (Black') voters as a combined category. In other words, whiteness correlated with strong support for Bolsonaro, but many non-white voters also backed him.


Rio racial dot map


This is particularly notable in the Northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, where ethnic self-identification resembles North-east Brazil, with a high Afro-descendant population, but where the vote for Bolsonaro was even higher than in the whiter, wealthier southern zone of the city. Following truces during the World Cup and the Olympics, Rio has been in an escalating state of open warfare between various drug trafficking cartels, the military and the police (with overlap between all three groups). Various voters in Recife and Salvador that I spoke to cited Brazil's extraordinarily high crime rate as a reason for supporting Bolsonaro. At a bus stop in Recife, two elderly black women told me that they'd voted for Bolsonaro because he would stop the bandits'.
I hate the bandits, I want to be safe on the street just kill them all!'


Homicide statistics


But if his proposed crackdown on violent crime is part of Bolsonaro's appeal amongst non-white voters, why was the swing to the far right so much stronger in Rio than in North-East Brazil? The map on the left shows that homicide rates are highest in the North-East and in Para, on the edge of the Amazon. The map on the right is even more noteworthy, showing that homicide rates since 2006 have increased most in the North-East, where Workers' Party support remains strongest. Bolsonaro's calls to give free rein to the police and arm good citizens' against criminals appeal to some Black voters in the North-East, but they remain a minority.


Rio Police murder rates


Indeed, the only metric of violence that is higher in Rio de Janeiro than in the North-East is the rate of murders by police, predominantly targeting young Black men. In 2016 the official number was 645, and rose to 1127 in 2017. By way of comparison, in the same year in the US, around 1200 people were killed across the entire country. In 2014 the most heavily targeted zones in Rio voted for the Workers' Party, but it is precisely here where the swing to Bolsonaro was strongest. While unfortunate, it makes a certain degree of sense that white, wealthy men in Southern Brazil would vote for Bolsonaro. But why would the young Black victims of police violence in Rio's favelas support him? As Rosana Pinheiro-Machado argues in her convincing analysis of this phenomenon, many of these young men previously supported Lula, but also identify with the police, the military and with Bolsonaro as a strongman who can end violence in their suburbs … with more violence. Toxic masculinity among other factors built around a cult of violence, is leading young men to vote for the very figure who poses the most risk to their future survival. Recent polls identify a striking gender disparity in support for Bolsonaro, with many young disadvantaged men backing him, while many women, even when opposed to the Workers' Party, are choosing to vote informally rather than support him. The future of the Amazon will be decided in the favelas of Rio, and at this stage, it's not looking hopeful.


Religious breakdown of Brazil's cities


Another factor in Rio's northern suburbs, and in marginalised areas across Brazil's major cities, has been the rapid expansion of Evangelical Christianity at the expense of Catholicism since the end of the dictatorship. Pentecostal drug lords, often converted in jail, wage Holy War' against Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda. The TV channel Record, owned by evangelical billionaire pastor Edir Macedo, and broadcasting Biblical soap operas interspersed with Bolsonaro propaganda, is emblematic of this transformation. The debate has shifted so far to the right that Globo, the conservative media giant that previously dominated the market, and supported the coup/impeachment against Dilma, has been accused by Bolsonaro supporters of being a communist front. In recent polls, Catholics are split 50-50 between Haddad and Bolsonaro, while Evangelicals are voting in Bolsonaro's favour, 74 per cent to 26 per cent. Bolsonaro himself is a Catholic, but has received support from Pentecostal churches backing his family values' based attacks (most of them entirely fictional) on the Workers' Party for promoting Gay Kits' and Gender Ideology' in schools.


Religious breakdown in Brazil's rural areas


In rural areas, Catholicism has retained its dominance in the North-East, while Evangelical congregations have grown fastest in the Amazon and the South-East. The Protestant churches are anything but a monolithic block, and a key division lies between the Pentecostal and Non-Pentecostal variants. Of the latter, some more moderate congregations preach a comparatively tolerant line on sexual and cultural issues. Marina Silva, a Black evangelical environmentalist born in the Amazon, gained the support of many evangelical churches in her failed bid for the presidency in 2014. However, in 2018 many of these same churches have been frontline advocates for the reactionary swing to Bolsonaro.
These are some of the broad trends that partly explain Bolsonaro's rise, but at the individual level, the life experiences and attitudes behind each person's voting decisions reveal an extra layer of psychological complexity that these maps can't capture. Last week I carried out interviews in Salvador, the heartland of Afro-Brazilian culture, where the Capoeira master Moa Katende had just been stabbed to death in a bar for declaring his support for the Workers' Party. Here I talked to a self-taught artist who wanted Bolsonaro to cut the Ministry of Culture to take down the artistic elites'; and a Catholic black single mother who was voting for Bolsonaro because he'll keep the gays in their place'.
I have a friend in the Amazon, a gay environmentalist who practices Spiritism, one of Brazil's many syncretic religious traditions under threat by Evangelical attacks. He is the most ideologically confusing person I have ever met. He believes that Cuban-backed communists in the Workers' Party are destroying the Amazon, that abortion was invented by the Ku Klux Klan to kill black people, and that Bolsonaro will stop women protesting naked on the street. Bolsonaro has made it clear that he plans to strip away Indigenous land rights, withdraw Brazil from the Paris agreement and sell the Amazon to American agribusiness interests. If I brought this up, or anything else that Bolsonaro has said on the public record, with any of these voters, they would say that it was taken out of context, that he doesn't mean it, that it's fake news.
Fascism in any era is amorphous, but in the age of fake news, the denial of evidence of rational debate is easier than ever. Bolsonaro has managed to turn himself into a Rorschach ink test: each voter can pick out the element of his bigotry and violence that appeal to them, and ignore the parts where he attacks their own group. It's a kind of intersectionality in reverse, where the oppressed turn on the oppressed, then team up together to elect a reactionary defender of the country's business and military elites. Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be. So said the writer Stefan Zweig, in a backhanded compliment to the nation that gave him asylum during the Second World War, shortly before killing himself. In this election, Brazil offers another portent of the future elsewhere: Multicultural fascism. The antisemitism of Nazism isn't there, at least not explicitly. Instead the enemy is a (racialised) criminal underclass, merged with a criminalised leftist opposition, with criminalised sexual deviants thrown into the mix.
On a personal level, I found each of the Bolsonaro voters that I spoke to kind, generous and often charming. Many of them don't particularly like Bolsonaro, and just want to punish the Workers' Party. We need a change, we'll just get rid of him in four years if he's no good', was a common refrain, ignoring Bolsonaro's own repeated insistence that if he were to lose an election, he would regard the result as fraud and reject it. Many of them have legitimate complaints about crime, corruption and the past impunity of the country's political elite. But in voting for Bolsonaro, they have embraced a fantasy of violent purification that will be a tragedy for both Brazil and the planet. In a video call to his supporters this week, Bolsonaro said that the red fringe dwellers would be banished' from Brazil, that they could go to prison or exile. Of the activists that I spoke to, many were indeed searching for ways to escape the country while they still had the chance. An environmental group in Pernambuco that was campaigning to protect one of the last local fragments of the Atlantic rainforest was going to disband, its participants fleeing to Portugal to avoid reprisals from local sugar plantation owners. In Salvador, a black gay hotel worker with two silver crucifixes hanging from his ears told me that the elections meant the end of the world for him and his community, and that he now doubted the existence of God, while his white manager ranted at the reception desk about URSAL, an invented communist conspiracy to unite Latin America.
Many will be staying on in Brazil to resist Bolsonaro, including the new wave of Black, Trans and Indigenous women elected to state and federal parliaments. In my last interviews before the elections, I talked to two Indigenous Guaraní friends living in the forested littoral of São Paulo state. The younger of the two was alarmed by the sudden explosion in support for Bolsonaro, and the threat this posed to Indigenous communities. His elder kinsman was more sanguine:
It'll be a bad government, but we've had bad governments here for five hundred years. We're in this for the long haul.

Image: São Paulo, Brazil, at night / flickr

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.
If you like this piece, or support Overland's work in general, please subscribe or donate.


Freg J Stokes is a writer, performer and map maker. His alter ego Twiggy Palmcock is a trusted confidante of both Clive Palmer and Tony Abbott.



https://overland.org.au/2018/10/un-mappa...-election/

[Lauren Johnson]

I have to think there were 'activists' trained and financed to help create the desired narratives in voters minds.

[Peter Lemkin]

[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD][TABLE="width: 100%, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD]The Intercept was created and designed to ensure that we could engage in fearless, independent, and adversarial journalism. As a result, we have been repeatedly targeted by powerful factions inside the U.S., including a particularly stringent attempt by the Justice Department to investigate our sources and malign our journalism.

Similar and worse attacks are now being mounted against us in the newly authoritarian Brazil, as a result of our unique coverage of the far-right movement, Jair Bolsanaro, and the institutions that have empowered them prior to the election last weekend

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD][TABLE="width: 100%, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD]Shortly before the election, the nation's second-largest media conglomerate, owned by the billionaire evangelical pastor and Bolsonaro supporter Edir Macedo, investigated not only editors and journalists who contribute reporting to The Intercept, but also their family members. Large corporate media outlets in Brazil have filed a lawsuit seeking to have the Intercept Brasil, along with several other foreign media outlets, barred from reporting in the country.

Since we began regularly reporting on Brazil in 2016, our audience and reach has exploded. Some of the most widely read articles in The Intercept's history have been in Portuguese, and leading Brazilian political figures now turn to us for their most important interviews. They know the value and impact of the unique platform we've built.

This has happened because the in-depth reporting we do is extremely rare in Brazil, where the media landscape is dominated by large conglomerates and independent outlets are few and far between. We have been able to apply the same adversarial, intrepid approach to investigative journalism that we use in the U.S. to Brazil, where, with the election of a genuine and frightening tyrant, it is needed now more than ever.

In 2018 alone, our audience size expanded rapidly, and we were able to produce reports that reverberated throughout the world:[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD][TABLE="width: 100%, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD]

• We published exclusive investigations about the 2018 elections, sending our reporters to every corner of Brazil to reveal corruption, contradictions, and the ground truth of how power is won (or taken) in this country. We've also conducted contentious, informative interviews with presidential candidates that were seen by millions.
  
• We exposed political pressure within R7, a "news" portal owned by billionaire pastor Edir Macedo, to support Bolsonaro's campaign and only publish negative news about the Workers' Party candidate Fernando Haddad. After publication, R7 and Record TV began investigating us and our associates in retaliation.
  
• We dug deep into the assassination of Rio City Councillor Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, a case that became an international scandal. We were the first to report that militias likely had a hand in their murders, and we used original data to expose their massive scope.
  
• We lifted the curtain on the hidden influences behind pesticide regulations how mega-corporations work to corrupt public and private agents and put cheap and dangerous poisons in the hands of agriculture workers and on the our tables.
  
• We explained how Bolsonaro uses "fake news" to deflect attention from his own scandals and how far-right groups and public officials spread lies on the internet, an attack on the electoral process.
  
• We also provided top-notch coverage and analysis of world events: a censorship scandal at Google, the unfolding mayhem of the Trump presidency, revelations of global espionage, the global disaster of climate change, gang violence in El Salvador, right-wing extremism in Europe, or Chinese prison camps.
  

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD][TABLE="width: 100%, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD]Jair Bolsonaro poses a severe threat not just to human rights inside Brazil, but also internationally through his alliances with some of the world's most reactionary regimes. His brazen promises to bulldoze key policies that protect the Amazon literally put the fate of the world at risk. With his election, we want not only to maintain, but to aggressively expand our coverage. To do so, The Intercept needs your help.

We were blown away by the outpouring of support from our readers in our first crowdfunding campaign; it allowed us to take our election coverage to the next level. We don't want to stop there. Will you start a recurring contribution to support independent reporting in Brazil?
CONTRIBUTE →[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD][TABLE="width: 100%, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD]Your recurring support is essential to our continued success and helps us make long-term investments into our reporting.

Thank you![/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD][TABLE="width: 100%, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD][TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"][TABLE="width: 150, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"] [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 396, align: right"]
[TR]
[TD]Glenn Greenwald
Co-founder of The Intercept
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Magda Hassan]

::beammeup::::dalek::::gtfo::::drevil::::vomit::::darthvader::

[Peter Lemkin]

::beammeup::::dalek::::gtfo::::drevil::::vomit::::darthvader::

I really feel sorry, sad and worried for Brazilians - more than a few of whom I have as personal friends - but all of them who are progressive, female, gay, non-white, non-evangelical Christian are really fucked!..... I fear in 4 years there will not be a new election - as he plans on creating a dictatorship ASAP. Expect a wave of Brazilians fleeing - those who can afford to...the others will suffer and die......