As they acquired wealth, the neo-Pentecostal churches started to build huge temples in the centres of cities, a physical manifestation and symbol of power every bit as emphatic as the great cathedrals of Western Christianity. The churches eschew the classic nave, tower and steeple Christian model. The biggest and most spectacular of the Universal c

By 2000 similar militias were spreading across the north and west of Rio, competing with the drug gangs for control of territory. In some areas they themselves had taken over the sale of cocaine and other illegal drugs or had established alliances with drug gangs. By 2020 the militias controlled a quarter of Rio de Janeiro’s territory and were exte

During the 2018 campaign, Bolsonaro had struck a chord with voters by criticising the way the indigenous reserves had stifled the state’s economic development, labelling the policy “separatist” and “dooming Roraima to economic failure”.3 Two indigenous reserves in particular – those established for the Yanomami to the north-west, where Ramalho’s ga

In March 2017, just as the national homicide rate started to rise, the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, an NGO that brings together academics, policymakers and police officers, found alarming evidence that the fear of falling victim to crime explained a surprisingly high degree of support for authoritarian right-wing politics.

Wilson Witzel was one of the extreme right-wing outsiders who had surfed a wave of anti-establishment sentiment to win the governorship of Rio de Janeiro in 2018. Many of the hardline police officers and evangelicals who provided the Bolsonaro family with such firm support in the state had voted for him. Now after declaring a lockdown, Witzel was d

Carlos Bolsonaro had been running his father’s Facebook and Twitter accounts since 2010 and had built a small team of digital activists, in which Filipe Martins, a star student of Carvalho, played a prominent role. The team, nicknamed the cabinet of hate (gabinete de ódio), allegedly occupied offices in the presidential palace in Brasília (although

Two Swedish missionaries brought Pentecostalism to Brazil in 1911, establishing the first Assemblies of God church in the city of Belém on the Amazon. The Assemblies of God, which itself is divided into various competing factions, is still the biggest Pentecostal church in Brazil,…

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While opinion polls showed that Brazil’s Congress and political parties were generally disliked, many Brazilians thought favourably of the armed forces. The military’s prestige was enhanced during the 2000s as a result of its participation in the Haiti peacekeeping mission and interventions in Brazilian cities, where the armed forces were invited b

Jair Bolsonaro and his more radical supporters have never sought to hide their disdain for the idea of global warming. Like one of their most important political mentors, Donald Trump, the Bolsonaristas are unremittingly sceptical about the science. Ernesto Araújo, Bolsonaro’s foreign minister, went so far as to claim that what he called “climatism