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

The promise of liberal economic reform and more transparent and responsible politics that had featured in the campaign of 2018 had proven to be empty. Pension reform had been achieved despite, not because of, Bolsonaro. Lava Jato and the anti-corruption campaigns that had excited public opinion from the mid-2010s had run their course. At worst Braz

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Carvalho’s background is unusual. Born in 1947, in his late teens he became an opponent of the military regime and by 1966 was a member of the Communist Party. After just two years Carvalho left the Communist Party and went to university to study psychology. In the early 1980s he wrote A imagem do homem na astrologia (The Image of Man in Astrology,

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But the Brasília-based prosecutors failed to make much progress against other MDB leaders. They had a strong case against Renan Calheiros, Romero Jucá and José Sarney – all senior figures who it was alleged had received bribes from Transpetro, a Petrobras subsidiary that runs fuel transportation operations. But in Janot’s words, it “hit a wall”. “W

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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

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