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

What do I mean by populism? Essentially, I see it as a political philosophy that seeks to reduce complex problems to simple choices. Almost invariably, populism scapegoats either the elite or a particular social group – bankers, immigrants or corrupt politicians – for the problems of society.

Early in 2021 the relationship between the Centrão and the government was strengthened further when Bolsonaro backed the bloc’s candidates for the presidencies of both houses of Congress. In the run-up to these internal elections the government released more than R$3bn for lawmakers to spend on public works in their districts. Government opponents

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

Brazil drug gangs have unusual origins in the sense that there is an overlap between both the First Command and the Red Command and the left-wing guerrilla groups that fought the military dictatorship from the late 1960s. The Red Command was formed in 1971 by prisoners at the Cândido Mendes gaol on Ilha Grande, across the water from the seaside res

Policy was weakening at exactly the time that scientific concerns about the impact of deforestation on global warming were multiplying. During the 1990s, and especially from the beginning of the twenty-first century, policymakers had come to worry about deforestation in the Amazon mainly because of the way that it directly released large amounts of

Fortaleza’s population has risen by 40.4 per cent in the last twenty years, with many newcomers concentrated in poor peripheral areas such as Palmeiras, Pirambu and Canindezinho.

After the Carandiru massacre in 1992 prison numbers continued to grow. During the first twenty years of this century Brazil’s overall population has grown from 175.9 million to 212.6 million, a rise of 20.9 per cent. Over the same period, the number of prisoners more than trebled. In December 2019 a system designed to accommodate 461,026 prisoners

Between 2000 and 2013 terrestrial television lost 28 per cent of its audience, with the pressure especially acute for Globo, which saw well-funded rivals like Record – owned by the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God – win market share.9 Television in Brazil remains widely viewed. Recent surveys suggest that Brazilians spend seve

The situation in Rio das Pedras was less positive, however, than it seemed. One barbarism had been kept at bay by another. Back in the 1980s community leaders had paid a group of off-duty policemen and other residents to keep out drug traffickers from the nearby City of God (Cidade de Deus), a favela whose gang violence was brought to international