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

“This [the Lava Jato team] was a group of young, technically skilled professionals mobilising in favour of ethical standards in politics.”13 It was soon clear that the Curitiba group identified the PT and Lula in particular as “the core of the problem”, even if in its early days the Lava Jato investigation had seemed to be fairly even-handed. To a

On 23 March 2021 – as this book was going to press – the Supreme Court ruled (by three votes to two) that Lula had not been treated impartially by the Curitiba court.

The defensive corporatism of both the military and civil police is so strong that it impedes the two forces from working together effectively, said Bueno. This helps explain why only about 8 per cent of homicides are ever solved.

Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 it has been more open to business with the world. China still heavily restricts foreign companies’ access to its own markets, but its international trade, within a market-based system and subject to the WTO’s rules and judgements, has expanded dramatically.2 This reshaped economic relations al

According to Google Trends, in September 2018 the search for the words ‘gay kit’ was the most popular in the country. After the first round paved the way for a two-way run-off between Bolsonaro and Haddad, the Bolsonaro media team went into overdrive, pumping out social media material that distorted the left-wing team’s support for gender rights an

In many ways, the liberal consensus over rights for prisoners or for LGBTQ people is out of sync with the instincts of those less well-off who did not attend university. This is the case in the US, the Philippines, Hungary or any of the other countries where right-wing populists have scored recent successes. But in Brazil, an additional factor help

One columnist called him the “president of small things”.24 In her colourful account of Bolsonaro’s crises, Thaís Oyama notes that big – and perhaps more abstract – policy questions were of no interest to Brazil’s leader. She quotes an adviser who saw Paulo Guedes try to explain macro-economic ideas to Bolsonaro during the election campaign. “It wa

Across Brazil, the growing evangelical community voted very heavily indeed for Bolsonaro in 2018. Three days before the second round run-off between Bolsonaro and Fernando Haddad, the PT candidate, the Datafolha conducted a poll that – in an era of polling surprises – proved to be remarkably accurate: 56 per cent of those interviewed said they woul

Like Marine Le Pen’s now estranged father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Front (now the Rassemblement) National, it could be said of Bolsonaro that he says “out loud what the people are thinking inside”.5 Bolsonaro’s similarities with Donald Trump are also notable, particularly because the Brazilian leader has openly expressed his admiratio