Beef, Bible and bullets: Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro

It is hard to say exactly why militias have become so prominent in the city. The causes are complex. For a start, Rio was the centre of a global empire in the nineteenth century and a glamorous, thriving political capital for the first half of the twentieth, but it was badly hit when Brazil’s capital was relocated to Brasília in 1960. In the 1970s

In 2020 the reliance on the Chinese market deepened. China’s early recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic allowed its economy to grow much faster than the depressed economies of the US, Europe and South America. Sales of soya climbed steadily and were given an additional boost by the trade war that reduced sales from the US, hitherto an important riva

6.25 hectares. 2019 started relatively quietly, but monthly data showed steadily escalating amounts of deforestation as the April–November dry season got underway. By August, when the black clouds were drifting towards São Paulo, the Deter data indicated that deforestation was running at three times the rate of the previous year. Inpe’s ‘deforestat

for Brazil, the key trend was the way China’s breakneck industrialisation and urbanisation absorbed raw materials. Soya beans were needed to provide the animal feed necessary if local pork and chicken producers were to satisfy the newly urbanised population’s demand for meat. Growing local production of steel girders and sheets – needed for the con

Wedged between Venezuela and Guyana, Roraima is Brazil’s deepest intrusion into the northern hemisphere.

The president had bet heavily on his relationship with Trump, calling the US president his “idol”.24 While much of the world recoiled from Trump’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat to Joe Biden, Bolsonaro and his supporters supported their US ally’s claims that a fraud had been committed. By the time Bolsonaro recognised President Biden’s win

During the 2010s social media such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and especially WhatsApp started to play a much more important role in political debate. Growing use of smartphones was partly responsible for this shift. According to the Brazilian Statistics and Geographical Institute (IBGE), 138 million Brazilians owned mobile phones by 2018, and ne

Brazil was perhaps worse hit by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic than any other country, and criticism of Bolsonaro’s denialism increased. The average number of active daily cases in the country rose by 17 per cent in the first two months of 2021, but by 45.5 per cent in the first three-and-a-half weeks of March. Over January and February,

In spite of this particular legal advance, the militias have continued to tighten their grip over many communities. A Datafolha survey conducted early in 2019 suggests that this has been the case for a while in the favelas. The survey found that while a majority of those interviewed “from all backgrounds” were still more fearful of the drug gangs,