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

As the financial power and social presence of the evangelical churches grew, so inevitably did their political influence. In the past many evangelicals had treated politics with a certain amount of disdain. Until well into the 1980s pastors at the Assemblies of God used to tell followers that “believers don’t mess with politics”, for example.25 But

Efforts to delimit a reserve for the Yanomami – who inhabited the west of the state and southern Venezuela – had begun in the late 1970s, stimulated in part by the pioneering reporting of the British journalist Norman Lewis. The Yanomami had suffered badly from Amazon expansionism. In the early 1970s, when the government decided to build a road alo

Loyal to the military regime’s nationalist economic policy, Bolsonaro had opposed the privatisations of state companies piloted through in the late 1990s by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and had even suggested that Cardoso should be shot for having sold off the publicly owned telecoms company, as well as stakes in the state-owned mining and

In response eight survivors – now housed at the Taubaté high security unit – said they would “organise to avoid another massacre”. In the 13th article of its founding statute, the Primeiro Comando do Capital threatened to “shake the system…

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When specialist units of armed police started to arrive at the homes of senior executives and take away suspects in handcuffs, it sent shockwaves through Brazil. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate the impact of these dawn raids on the homes of the wealthy and powerful. Before Lava Jato, only the poor or the badly defended went to prison. The case app

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,

As a bemused El País correspondent asked as he watched spectators boo the hitherto popular Dilma Rousseff at the opening game of the Confederations Cup in Brasilia: “Why has a protest movement emerged now when for ten years Brazil seems to have been anaesthetised through its internationally applauded success? […] The country is going through a kind

Populism can take a left-wing or right-wing shape depending on the histories and circumstances of particular countries, although “broadly speaking left-wing populism combines with socialism, right-wing populism with nationalism”.

Roraima also reflected, in a particularly acute form, the general dilemma shared by all of Brazil’s Amazon states. It has abundant natural wealth – fertile land, plentiful water and rich deposits of gold, diamonds and other valuable minerals – but its ability to take advantage of this is limited. More perhaps than anywhere else in Brazil, businesse