“The only thing that’s saving our planet is our rainforest,” says Bitaté, a young member of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous people, in the film. “I believe the Amazon is the heart not just of Brazil, but the whole world.”

“The Territory,” which is showing in select U.S. and Canadian cities, chronicles the perilous efforts of Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau like Bitaté to defend their ancestral home as white settlers seek to illegally slash and burn the forest and turn it into pasturelands. The forest is officially protected by the Brazilian government, but Pritz shows how far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian state’s hostility toward Indigenous people emboldens the land thieves.

The film is very timely. Brazil is gearing up for highly polarized presidential elections in October. And, with the climate emergency exploding across the globe, environmental and Indigenous concerns remain in the spotlight, particularly following the brutal assassinations of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in the Amazon in June.

Cattle ranching is the leading cause of Amazon deforestation, which has increased at a dramatic rate in recent years, much of it illegal. So much of the rainforest has already been cut down that scientists believe we are on the verge of an irreversible tipping point. The Amazon also serves as an essential carbon sink in the fight against climate change and generates the rainfall that supports almost all life on the South American continent. Ranching, as well as mining, logging, and factory farming — embraced by politicians and bankers as agents of “economic progress” — are driving us ever closer to an environmental (and socioeconomic) catastrophe.

“The Territory” was shot on the front lines of an active war zone almost 500 years after the conflict began, following the arrival of the first Europeans in search of gold. No nuclear weapons are involved, but the conflict has the potential to dramatically alter the course of life on Earth.

Pritz and his team spent three years on the southern edge of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, beginning in 2018, just as Bolsonaro, in the name of economic development, was campaigning on promises to roll back Indigenous rights and empower miners, loggers, and ranchers. The land grabbers of the Amazon saw the opportunity.

“This is how Brazil was created,” a settler named Martins tells the camera in Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory, his arms speckled with wood chips from the once towering tree he had just felled.

Modern Brazil, like the rest of the Americas, was built on the genocide of Indigenous people and the forced expropriation of their lands — programs conducted by enterprising settlers, the government, and large infusions of international capital. Martins is among the poor, dispossessed, landless peasants in the film, but their like is backed and financed by powerful interests that the camera does not capture.

The colonial process has been such a successful endeavor that the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau have been decimated — less than 200 of them remain.

“People say they’re there, but nobody’s ever seen them,” said one aspiring settler, hoping to dismiss the property claims of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and other Indigenous people who live on the reserve. Cribbing from apologists for colonialism quoted in history books, Sergio, a settler leader, tells the camera, “The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, they don’t farm or create anything. They just live there.”

The settlers employ sometimes paradoxical rhetoric to justify their actions: patriotism, progress, fairness, the perception that the Indigenous do not make good use of their land, and even doubts that they really even exist — all infused with Christian values and heavy-handed claims to divine right.

“If there is a villain, it’s the people behind Sergio and Martins that are financing this, the people that are really benefiting from having these poor disenfranchised farmers remain with the idea that it is Indigenous people who are holding them back,” Pritz, the director, told The Intercept. “In America, same as in Brazil, it’s advantageous for the political class to keep disenfranchised people fighting amongst themselves because it keeps the heat off them.”

The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in the film are more direct and concise in their analysis than the settlers. “They just want money,” one unnamed elder tells a gathering of leaders. “That’s all it is.”

Photos: Top/Right: An invader rides his motorcycle through the rainforest fire blaze. Bottom/Left: A cattle feed lot in southern RondÙnia, where beef production accounts for the majority of deforestation. This area was once all rainforest. Photos: Alex Pritz/Amazon Land Documentary

Hope in the face of overwhelming odds is the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau’s strategy. Fears of the complete extermination of their people — genocide — are on the lips of multiple Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in the film. They are angry but also cognizant that they are outgunned. Rather than use the warfare tactics of their ancestors, we accompany their surveillance teams, armed with bows and arrows, drones, cameras, and GPS trackers, to document and report invasions to authorities with the help of environmentalist allies.

This is one of the contradictions that the film reveals: The Indigenous, derided as backwards by their enemies, employ modern technology and sophisticated public relations to promote a vision for the future that is increasingly the only hope for survival. Meanwhile, the supposed agents of socioeconomic progress use antiquated ideologies and outright criminality to destroy Brazil’s most precious resource.

Indigenous groups are also testing their luck in courts. The patrols, meanwhile, take matters into their own hands and snuff out incipient invasions whenever they judge it safe enough to do so.

Invasions into Indigenous territories are up 180 percent under Bolsonaro, according to a new study by the Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples. The land raiders’ bonanza has proved dangerous to the Indigenous and their defenders, who live under constant threat from ruthless enemies.

Phillips and Pereira, the journalist and Indigenous expert, respectively, were assassinated about 500 miles to the northwest while working with a similar surveillance project being implemented in the Javarí Valley, a sprawling Indigenous reserve on the border with Colombia and Peru. The accused murderers were illegal fishermen with alleged ties to politicians and international drug smuggling networks.

Prior to the killing, the Indigenous patrol group had repeatedly denounced the activities of this gang to authorities with documented evidence, but nothing came of it. Human rights organizations complain that the police have been hesitant to investigate who is really behind the killers.

Phillips, who was writing a book called “How to Save the Amazon,” strongly believed that most of the people committing environmental crimes on the ground are also victims of a system designed to make unsustainable development their only viable economic option. In addition to empowering Indigenous movements, he argued, any solution must include more sustainable alternatives for those working in the extractive and land-grabbing industries — the very sort of people that assassinated Phillips.

None of this is likely to happen under the current government. Recent polling suggests that leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva continues to lead nationwide, but Bolsonaro and aligned anti-Indigenous and anti-environment politicians have the upper hand in the Amazon region in this October’s elections.

All hope is not lost, though: Eighty-one percent of Brazilians believe that protecting the Amazon should be a priority of the next president, and two-thirds nationally, and in the North specifically, believe the Bolsonaro administration is not actively combating crimes such as land grabbing, drug trafficking, and illegal logging in the region, according to another recent poll.

“The government isn’t doing their job. That’s our reality — they’re not. And now we’re doing their work for them.”

It seems contradictory that polls show that people in Brazil’s north both support Bolsonaro and want more done to protect the Amazon, but the responses are indicative of the complexity of the issues at hand.

The realities are that policies of death and destruction are subsidized by the government and bankrolled by faraway investors, while criminality is not held accountable. Options for Brazilians are limited.

It is easy to imagine that if alternative, sustainable economic models were incentivized, a different electoral reality would exist. “In another world,” said Pritz, “Sergio could be an advocate for agrarian reform and some of these other leftist movements.” Instead, social programs, law enforcement, and sustainable development have been whittled away and most Brazilians are feeling increasingly desperate.

“The government isn’t doing their job,” Bitaté says in “The Territory.” “That’s our reality — they’re not. And now we’re doing their work for them.” The young Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau leader spoke as he was trekking through the forest in search of invaders. The words, though, could just as easily have come from the mouth of Martins as he chainsawed the path for a new road into the reserve that he hoped will one day be built — the only path he can imagine to escaping poverty.

The post The Front Lines of the End of the World — and the Fight to Save the Amazon appeared first on The Intercept.

Dom Phillips, a freelance reporter with more than 14 years of experience covering the Amazon, was traveling to the Javari Valley, near the triple border of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, for a book he is writing about environmental issues. He was accompanied by Bruno Araújo Pereira, a veteran Indigenous rights protector who supervised the region for years for FUNAI and who has reportedly received many death threats for his work defending Indigenous groups in the region against illegal mining, fishing, and logging. The area is also known to be an active smuggling route for drug traffickers.

The two men were traveling on the Ituí and Itaqui rivers, returning to the town of Atalaia do Norte, in the state of Amazonas, after a multiday trip to visit with FUNAI agents and Indigenous communities, according to a statement from the Union of Indigenous Organizations of Javari Valley and the Observatory for Human Rights for Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples. The men had received threats during their journey, according to the statement, which did not specify the source of the threats.

“It should be noted that Bruno Pereira is an experienced person with a deep knowledge of the region,” read the statement from the two groups. “The two missing men were traveling with a new boat, a 40 [horsepower engine], 70 liters of gasoline, enough for the trip and 7 empty drums of fuel.”

Their boat was last seen passing the community of São Gabriel, less than two hours from Atalaia do Norte, some time after 6 a.m. Sunday. When the boat did not arrive as expected, local Indigenous groups mobilized search parties that afternoon, but no signs of the men or their boat have yet been found. FUNAI told The Intercept that it was actively following the case and noted that Pereira is on leave from the organization and was not operating in an official capacity on the trip.

Phillips, an award-winning reporter who has written for The Intercept, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and many other outlets, had traveled to the Amazon on four other reporting trips in the last 15 months. He received threats on previous trips over the years while reporting on criminal, environmentally destructive activities. In 2021, he received the prestigious Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to write his still unpublished book.

The federal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Amazonas told The Intercept that it was aware of the disappearance and had begun investigating and called on police and the navy to begin searching, but it could not confirm if those search efforts were already underway. The Brazilian navy said in a statement that a search-and-rescue team was ordered to begin a search but did not confirm whether it had already been deployed. The Federal Police did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. The spokesperson for the regional army command told The Guardian that it is “ready to carry out this humanitarian search and rescue mission” but has not yet received orders to do so from the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly demonized the press. In 2019, Bolsonaro supporters widely circulated a video of the president aggressively responding to a question from Phillips about the environment with the caption “British journalist tries to put Bolsonaro against the wall and is refuted by the president.”

“I am very worried about the growth of violence against journalists in Brazil, especially in the Amazon region, because it is home to very sensitive issues: irregular burnings, invasions of Indigenous villages by wildcat miners, loggers, and armed people who want to expel Indigenous people from their lands,” said Angelina Nunes, who runs the Tim Lopes Program for the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism, which investigates the assassinations of journalists in the country.

“It’s very dangerous for anyone who is going to investigate a story there that will deal with these subjects, and we’re accompanying this case with great concern,” added Nunes, by telephone. Her organization has tracked 173 cases of aggression against journalists in Brazil since January, including 45 physical attacks or threats of physical violence.

“It is urgent that the authorities dedicate all the necessary resources to the immediate realization of the searches in order to guarantee their safety,” wrote Maria Laura Canineu, Brazil director of Human Rights Watch.

The post British Journalist and Indigenous Protector Are Missing in Brazilian Amazon After Reported Threats appeared first on The Intercept.

The race is now essentially a two-way dispute with far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, who has gained ground in recent months but is being held back by rising prices and unemployment. The matchup between the hard-line former soldier and the ex-labor leader once imprisoned for leading a strike in defiance of Brazil’s military dictatorship will be a referendum on two substantially different visions for Brazil’s future: Bolsonaro’s embrace of right-wing populist culture wars and unbridled neoliberal economics versus Lula’s pitch for a return to social spending to improve conditions for average citizens. If no candidate wins an absolute majority of votes, a second-round runoff will be held at the end of October.

Bolsonaro benefits from the power of his office, his motivated base, and influential political allies. He hopes to sway undecided and anti-Lula voters now up for grabs after right-leaning candidates like former Justice Minister Sergio Moro and former São Paulo Gov. João Doria dropped out of the race. The president is determined to appeal to Brazilians’ conservative sensibilities, as he successfully did in 2018, and distract from the economic downturn and 666,000 Covid-19 deaths that occurred under his leadership. Most voters said that their economic situation has deteriorated under Bolsonaro and that the economy will have a significant influence on their vote.

Bolsonaro’s three and a half years in office have been politically polarizing, defined by his dismantling of many of the most successful social and economic policies that defined Lula’s tenure and the acceleration of bloody social conflicts that trace back to Brazil’s colonial days. As president, he has supported illegal mining and deforestation on protected Indigenous lands; applauded police and vigilante violence against the poor, minorities, and political foes; and pushed deregulation, privatization, and lucrative tax cuts for corporate backers, arguing that these measures would jumpstart the economy.

Since 2019, Brazil has had one of the worst performing economies globally in terms of GDP growth, unemployment, and investment. Tens of millions of Brazilians have become food insecure, a problem now affecting more than half the country. Under Bolsonaro, inflation has tripled to over 12 percent, and the country’s currency has performed poorly against the dollar, raising prices on everything from gasoline to beans.

By contrast, from 2003 to 2010, Lula presided over a period of exceptional economic prosperity and championed measures that reduced inequality. The former union organizer and metalworker left office with an unprecedented 80 percent approval rating. Lula’s reputation suffered damage as the economy soured under his successor and a now-discredited anti-corruption crusade by prosecutors saw him jailed for 580 days. Still, he remained the most popular politician in Brazil and was leading polls in 2018 before the convictions, which have since been vacated, made him ineligible to run for office.

Four years later, he is campaigning on a message of a return to normalcy, decency, and the good years of his presidency. Or, as he prefers to put it, when average workers could afford to “eat steak and drink beer” on the weekends.

Regional trends also point in Lula’s favor. Dramatic swing elections in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru ended a brief conservative wave that coincided with Bolsonaro’s parabolic rise, and left-leaning presidents now predominate across Latin America. Leftist Gustavo Petro is favored to win a runoff election in Colombia in two weeks against a radical right-wing populist.

In an effort to signal moderation to economic elites, centrists, and repentant Bolsonaro voters, Lula has brought on former São Paulo Gov. Geraldo Alckmin as his vice presidential running mate. Alckmin ran to the right of Lula in the 2006 elections. Now, he has joined a unity coalition meant to appeal to a broad swath of anti-Bolsonaro voters — a partnership that has rankled some on the left.

“I am calm and I am sure that we have all the conditions to win,” Lula said in a radio interview last month. But that confidence may have veered into complacency. The 76-year-old candidate decided to fire his two top communications staffers in April after a series of missteps and a sudden decrease in his polling lead. Bolsonaro’s 2018 win was bolstered by an innovative digital communications strategy and, critics have argued, Lula’s party has failed to keep up.

Lula’s lead is most dramatic among women and younger, poorer, and less educated voters, as well as Catholics, unemployed people, and Black Brazilians, who are a demographic majority. Bolsonaro’s highest approval ratings are among business leaders and the wealthiest voters. He has invested heavily in courting the growing conservative evangelical Christian population, but recent polls show the two candidates in a statistical dead heat among these voters. Nearly 1 in 5 Bolsonaro voters from 2018 now plan to vote for Lula, according to a recent poll.

Bolsonaro, however, has locked in political alliances with powerful friends. In Brazil’s complex system, these partnerships increase a candidate’s access to publicly funded radio and TV advertising time, campaign cash, and well-oiled local political machines with established patronage networks. Last-minute party switching among elected officials earlier this year turned Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party into the largest bloc in the lower house of Congress, a sign of his continued strength.

Meanwhile, in an effort to delegitimize the electoral process, Bolsonaro is again ramping up attacks on the Supreme Court and unsubstantiated claims that the country’s electronic balloting system is susceptible to hacking and fraud. New polling found that the majority of Brazilians now have no or little trust in the country’s voting infrastructure. Bolsonaro has repeatedly suggested that if he does not win in October, it would be due to voter fraud and he would not accept the outcome — a position that has earned direct rebukes from CIA Director William Burns and U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, as well as criminal investigations ordered by Brazil’s Supreme Court and Superior Electoral Court. Bolsonaro’s unsubstantiated conspiracy theories mirror Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 loss in the United States.

The threat of violence also looms. “I want every good citizen to have their firearm to resist, if necessary, an attempted dictatorship,” Bolsonaro told a crowd at an agriculture expo last month, repeating a common refrain. His administration has slashed restrictions on gun ownership, causing the number of legal firearms in Brazil to triple since 2018.

Like Trump, even if Bolsonaro is voted out of office, his influence and ideas will continue to hold sway over a large segment of the electorate and political elite. Last month, a group of influential reserve generals with ties to Bolsonaro’s inner circle released a detailed plan for right-wing governance over the next 13 years. “Nation Project: Brazil in 2035” proposes to end free universal health care and tuition-free public universities; “limit the interference of the Globalist Movement” in Brazil; and “remove the radical restrictions of indigenous and environmental legislation in areas attractive to agribusiness and mining.”

These military hard-liners and their civilian allies are keeping busy across Brazil to elect ideologically aligned candidates to Congress this October, in hopes of keeping Bolsonaro’s agenda alive and Lula’s at bay whether or not their president is reelected.

The post Lula Leads, but Bolsonaro Could Still Win Reelection in Brazil appeared first on The Intercept.

Bolsonaro, the far-right ideologue and a former army captain himself, made good on his pledge. In 2018, he was elected president with an outspoken retired general as his running mate.

It wasn’t always an obvious turn for the politician and Brazil’s most powerful institution. For many years, military leaders looked down on Bolsonaro, owing to his notorious acts of insubordination. By 2014, as the visit to Agulhas Negras demonstrates, things had clearly changed. The joint power play was already in motion, years before its fruition.

In office, Bolsonaro quickly appointed active-duty and reserve military officers to important civilian posts in his administration — thousands more than any democratically elected president in modern history — handing over responsibility for large swaths of the federal budget and control over the government. With Bolsonaro known to have little patience for the minutiae of his office — he works short hours — critics have consistently wondered who is really running Brazil: the generals or the president?

Not since the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985 has the army enjoyed such power. The military has used Bolsonaro’s presidency as a vehicle to reclaim political power more subtly than in the past while also more effectively shielding itself from public resentment. Riding the far-right wave, 72 military and police candidates were elected to state and federal office in 2018. Two years later, 859 more won municipal contests.

Military officials ascended to top appointments in government. Some of them were revealed to be at the center of the Bolsonaro administration’s most brazen public corruption schemes and anti-democratic actions. So far, the military appointees have avoided prosecution, or even much scrutiny, perhaps thanks to not-so-veiled threats to Congress and members of the media.

This reality stands in sharp contrast to the public image that Bolsonaro and the military have long cultivated as correctives to the corruption of civilian politicians — despite ample evidence to the contrary. In this October’s elections, the shift in public image could become a liability for Bolsonaro and his military allies.

The military, for its part, is taking steps to ensure that its newfound power will persist no matter who wins the presidential race.

Military Showered With Benefits

Bolsonaro will have showered the Brazilian Armed Forces and police with around $5 billion in new federal money by the end of his first term, according to an analysis by the Estadão newspaper — a considerable sum in a country with an annual discretionary budget limited to around $19 billion and for a president who promised to reduce spending. Defense received the highest discretionary funding allotment of any ministry in the 2021 and 2022 budgets.

While the military has flourished, deep cuts in federal spending have been felt in health, education, environment, science, culture, small-scale agriculture, food security, and anti-poverty programs. Yet in the last three years, the Armed Forces have been spared from the budget cuts, pension reforms, and wage freezes that have impacted Brazil’s civilian ministries and public workforce.

In the last three years, the Armed Forces have been spared from the budget cuts, pension reforms, and wage freezes that have impacted Brazil’s civilian ministries and public workforce.

Brazil spends more on its military than the next six Latin American countries combined but nonetheless is known for relying on antiquated equipment. That is because more than 83 percent of its budget goes to salaries and benefits, the majority of which pays for ample pensions and retirement benefits. Bolsonaro, who came into office promising dramatic austerity reforms, has cut social security benefits and public sector pensions, but the military has not been subject to the most severe measures. Military jobs have even seen pay raises.

The president has also pushed through benefits to foster goodwill among police and firefighting agencies, most of which are militarized forces, including giving significant raises to certain officers.

Bolsonaro has repeatedly backed, but failed to pass, a bill that would make it harder to prosecute members of the police and military for crimes such as homicide. Such prosecutions are already astoundingly rare in a country where officers kill more than 17 civilians per day, according to underreported official statistics, and where organized crime gangs led by security forces are a growing menace.

One of the more long-term initiatives in Bolsonaro’s pro-military agenda includes a push to incentivize state and local public schools to “militarize.” In exchange for federal funding and logistical support, the schools adopt a military-style curriculum and create a minimum number of jobs for police and military reservists, who also take over the school’s administration. Nationwide statistics are incomplete, but in the state of Paraná, the governor pledged to militarize around 10 percent of the more than 2,000 schools under his authority.

Thanks to Bolsonaro, some active-duty military officers and reservists, like those working in public schools, can use a loophole to inflate their paychecks. They can now receive their full salary or pension and simultaneously take home the full pay for other public sector work they perform even if the total pay exceeds constitutional limits for public servants, around $90,000 a year. By comparison, half of all Brazilian workers earn $2,775, the national minimum wage, or less annually.

Among the beneficiaries of this new regulation are the president, who gave himself a 6 percent raise, the vice president, and the military officials in Cabinet positions. Reserve Gen. Joaquim Silva e Luna, appointed by Bolsonaro to lead Petrobras, the state-run oil giant, earns nearly six times the limit, a fact that has even drawn criticism from within the ranks.

The Military’s Long Game

That the military would have again waded deep into Brazilian politics solely for cash perks is improbable. “This is important, but it’s not everything,” Piero Leirner, an anthropology professor who has spent his career studying the military, told The Intercept. “The fact that strikes me the most is the restructuring of the state, with a change in legal provisions to produce a convergence of decisions towards military bodies.”

Ana Penido, a defense researcher at São Paulo State University, agrees. “Many analysts have been raising the possibility that something similar to the U.S. deep state is being set up in Brazil,” she said, “that framework where it doesn’t matter if Democrats or Republicans are in charge, some things always remain the same.”

“Many analysts have been raising the possibility that something similar to the U.S. deep state is being set up in Brazil.”

Both specialists point specifically to the Institutional Security Office, or GSI, a Cabinet-level body overseen by a military officer with responsibilities ranging from serving as the president’s chief national security adviser to directly overseeing ABIN, Brazil’s intelligence agency. The GSI was shut down by former President Dilma Rousseff in 2015, who transferred its responsibilities to civilian control, but it was immediately reestablished after her impeachment.

Bolsonaro put Gen. Augusto Heleno, a former aide to a hard-line general who attempted a palace coup during the dictatorship, in charge of the GSI. Heleno was part of an elite group of generals who advised Bolsonaro during the 2018 campaign and has remained an influential voice in the president’s inner circle through years of infighting and intrigue. In turn, he has broadened the GSI’s power considerably, expanding the agency into gathering more politicized and further-reaching intelligence and deploying ABIN spies to infiltrate important ministries.

“It is a more underground project being constructed during the Bolsonaro government that would have the ability to continue influencing power regardless of who wins the election,” said Penido.

As Bolsonaro’s political future dims, finding a way to hang on to power has become increasingly important for the military. “I don’t think they love Bolsonaro for who he is,” Penido said of the generals. “Their priority is their military ‘family,’ and they will join anyone who can prove they are competitive against Lula” — former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Workers’ Party politician who is leading the early polls. If an alternative to Lula fails to emerge, Penido said, the military will continue to do what it can: “They are making the political calculations to try to remain in important positions of power or at least negotiate on the best possible terms.”

Leirner believes that the military has maintained so much access to power under Bolsonaro — controlling the intelligence apparatus and spreading its officials across the government — that its leadership may be able to seize the upper hand no matter who emerges in power. He said, “They have collected a vast amount of information that can compromise almost everyone in politics.”

The post Bolsonaro Gave Brazil’s Army New Powers. The Generals Won’t Give Them Up Easily. appeared first on The Intercept.

The right worshipped Moro for his role as the judge who put former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva behind bars on corruption charges. The popularity propelled Moro to high office, as justice  minister under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who won the 2018 election after the frontrunner, Lula, was made ineligible by Moro’s conviction.

For all three men, the tables have now dramatically turned. The Supreme Court freed Lula and vacated Moro’s rulings, determining that the judge acted with bias after The Intercept revealed compromising, secret chat logs showing illicit collusion between Moro and the prosecutors. Attempts to revive the cases against Lula have subsequently been thrown out, leaving Moro’s legacy damaged. It was yet another hit to Moro’s credibility, which was decimated during his brief, controversial, and at times humiliating tenure in the Bolsonaro government, culminating in an anti-climactic, acrimonious departure in 2020.

Following a high-paying consulting gig in Washington and even work on behalf of an Israeli billionaire accused of corruption and rights abuses, Moro is now running for president himself. Facing off against both his far more charismatic archnemeses, though, the former judge is struggling to break into double digits in polling.

A resurgent Lula, on the other hand, is ascendant, polling at nearly 50 percent with the lowest negative numbers of any major candidate. For his part, Bolsonaro, battered by an ailing economy and his administration’s disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, is only managing to attract just over 20 percent of voters.

Running From Scandals

During his book tour, the unofficial launch of his presidential campaign, Moro conspicuously dodged inconvenient questions about the mounting scandals that undercut his carefully crafted image. Interviews tend only to be granted to friendly outlets. At the book launch, Moro refused to take questions from the press and pre-signed books to avoid a fan meet-and-greet where questions could’ve been sprung on him.

The autobiography, “Against the System of Corruption,” lays out the official narrative of his professional life but brazenly elides the secret chat logs first published by The Intercept in June 2019. Moro has refused to acknowledge the archive’s authenticity, though he has claimed no wrongdoing was exposed in the chats. In his book, Moro also presents himself as an earnest political outsider who was deceived by a president that proved to be unscrupulous — a self-serving framing that ignores decades of Bolsonaro’s corruption and indecency.

The reputational damage caused by Moro’s partnership with Bolsonaro was easy to see coming: The chat records show that prosecutors from the Operation Car Wash, the very corruption investigation that Moro had overseen, clearly predicted the eventual outcome. “As Justice Minister, I think it will give rise — with reason — to arguments about the politicization of Car Wash,” one prosecutor wrote in concurrence with his colleagues.

From his perch in the Justice Ministry, Moro helped Bolsonaro shake off investigations into his family and worked alongside politicians accused of corruption. Moro’s positions and authority were repeatedly undermined by Bolsonaro. His first signature legislative package included a Bolsonaro-backed proposal that actually served to promote corruption by making it easier for police officers to escape punishment for crimes committed in the line of duty.

Moro himself has admitted to potential crimes under Brazilian law, including negotiating a special pension for his ministerial role. Bolsonaro accused the former justice minister of trying to negotiate a Supreme Court appointment in exchange for lending his credibility to the far-right administration.

The reputational damage caused by Moro’s partnership with Bolsonaro was easy to see coming.

This week, as part of the evidence collection in an investigation into potential wrongdoing by Operation Car Wash officials, a high court ordered the Washington-based consulting firm Moro worked for to turn over records about what the former judge did and the pay he received.

In a promotional interview last week, Moro declined an invitation to appear alongside Ciro Gomes, a center-left presidential hopeful, for a public conversation. Gomes, a former governor and federal minister, is known for an incisive debating style and an impressive ability to corner adversaries with wonky data points on a broad range of subjects. Moro, by contrast, has been criticized for his political inexperience and a lack of specifics in his platform.

“Ciro first needs to drop this offensive and aggressive posture in order for us to open up a dialogue,” Moro said. Gomes, a vocal critic of Car Wash, responded on YouTube the next day: “He doesn’t want to debate me because I’m going to say he’s corrupt.”

Recent polls show the two candidates neck and neck in the fight for a distant third-place finish — making neither likely to advance to a second-round runoff should Lula and Bolsonaro stay in the race.

Moro, Media Darling

While Brazil’s mainstream media often ignores Lula or casts him in a negative light, Moro suffers no shortage of glowing coverage — despite his lackluster polling numbers and vague policy proposals.

In November, Moro joined the relatively small, right-wing Podemos political party, the first formal requirement in a presidential bid. As journalist Fagner Torres noted, in the weeks following the affiliation ceremony, Moro was featured on the front page of the influential O Globo newspaper once every three days. Other major newspapers, radio stations, and television networks were similarly attentive. There has been little, if any, critical coverage of Moro’s scandals.

“Moro represents a part of Brazilian society, which includes a large share of the media, that does not accept Lula and is ashamed of its previous support for Bolsonaro,” said Fabio de Sa e Silva, an assistant professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Oklahoma. “His strategy will be to try to sustain the character that was created for him. I think this character is out of step with Brazil today, but it is a character that corresponds with many of the interests of some powerful groups in Brazil.”

For Moro, the media brought him to fame through his anti-corruption stances — and corruption has continued to be his focus, rather than the economic and health problems foremost on Brazilians’ minds. It has so far worked in the press, including the international business press, if not quite the polls: Moro is hailed as a “third way” candidate: a nonpartisan, unifying alternative to the left-right “polarization” between Lula and Bolsonaro.

“Moro, if he truly represents an alternative path, is an alternative path to Bolsonarismo and not away from so-called polarization.”

Moro is using this media narrative to try to capture the same winning coalition Bolsonaro built in 2018, when the far-right candidate enjoyed positive media coverage. Moro’s critics, though, said his try for the same coalition reveals a campaign that essentially puts a more polite patina on the same sort of far-right politics leveraged by the brash Bolsonaro.

Sa e Silva pointed to right-wing military figures who had served in the Bolsonaro government but became disenchanted and now embrace Moro’s candidacy. “It is further evidence that Moro, if he truly represents an alternative path,” Sa e Silva said, “is an alternative path to Bolsonarismo and not away from so-called polarization.”

A Conciliatory Lula

In contrast to Moro, Lula has been charting a course of conciliation for 2022 — much as he did during his first presidential victory in 2002. Although he has not officially confirmed he is running for president, he is far along in the process of courting Geraldo Alckmin of the center-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party, to be his vice president. The alliance with a former rival is designed to soften opposition to Lula’s candidacy from the nation’s business elite and indicate a desire to build a broad coalition.

In stark contrast to Bolsonaro’s growing global isolation, Lula has been traveling the world, being fêted by world leaders. Yet Brazilian mainstream media outlets were slow to cover the warm receptions Lula received on his trips.

Instead, the Brazilian press has taken a hostile posture toward Lula. When the former president did an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País that won positive headlines in Europe, Brazilian corporate media focused on an incomplete clip from his interview about the recent election in Nicaragua to accuse Lula of being an enemy of democracy — even comparing him to Bolsonaro.

“The media was very hostile to Lula during Operation Car Wash and has not been friendly so far this election cycle,” said Marcelo Semer, a state appeals court judge and author. “The Bolsonaro administration has been a complete tragedy, but the media still clearly prefers Moro — the candidate who is most ideologically aligned with Bolsonaro — to win next year. It is normalizing Moro’s candidacy and protecting him just like Bolsonaro was protected in 2018.”

The post Turned Tables: In Presidential Polls, Brazil’s Lula Leads Judge Who Locked Him Up appeared first on The Intercept.

The steady drumbeat of growing agriculture and deforestation has accelerated in recent years and is now poised to reach a more frenzied pace, driven in part by the search for investment returns by Americans who put money into index and mutual funds for their retirement.

Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his congressional allies have implemented policies that they hope will entice even more foreign investors to look past the smoldering rainforest ashes to focus on the opportunities for tax-free profits in the $359 billion agriculture industry.

Major international financial firms, eyeing a global commodities boom, have been eager to grow their agricultural portfolios in places like Brazil, the world leader in soy and beef production. Firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and JPMorgan have pumped $157 billion into firms directly tied to deforestation in the five years since the Paris climate agreement was signed.

Deforestation is pushing two interconnected biomes — the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado tropical savanna — dangerously close to the point of environmental collapse. The likely resulting desertification, continentwide drought, and gargantuan carbon dioxide releases would be catastrophic, scientists warn.

Dozens of the world’s largest investors have formally partnered with the climate change-denying Bolsonaro government on agriculture. Through the Climate Bonds Initiative, or CBI, an organization funded in part by global banks, they have rebranded some of the world’s most ecologically and ethically problematic companies as “green,” “sustainable,” and “climate-aligned” investments — meaning purportedly socially conscious 401(k) retirement funds can buy in. Stocks and bonds of most of Brazil’s agribusiness leaders are publicly traded on Brazilian and U.S. markets.

Even nominally “green” investments can finance more deforestation.

Even nominally “green” investments, however, can finance more deforestation. Most of the 56 percent of American households who own stock, mainly through index and mutual funds that spread investments across many assets, are financing companies directly and indirectly responsible for destroying Brazil’s tropical forests, pushing the Earth ever closer to an avoidable climate apocalypse.

The rising influence of global finance, a process known as financialization, in Brazilian agricultural practices can exacerbate social problems in the affected regions. Jennifer Clapp, a political economist at the University of Waterloo focused on global food security and sustainability, said, “This kind of financial investment has also been associated with an expansion of production in lands not previously under cultivation, which can lead to deforestation, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss.”

Big Agro, Big Impacts

In July 2019, Bolsonaro dismissed environmentalism as a “psychosis” — “only vegans,” he said, care about environmental issues. As he spoke, huge swaths of the Amazon were on fire. Land grabbers illegally cut down forests and burned them to convert them into new cattle pastures. At least 15,000 square miles of the Amazon rainforest have been destroyed under Bolsonaro’s watch, a much higher rate than under recent past administrations.

Major meat processors like JBS, Marfrig, and Minerva do not track whether the cattle they slaughter and export is raised on illegally deforested land, even though the methodology exists to do so. JBS, the world’s leading animal protein producer, also leads the Brazil soy and cattle deforestation tracker by environmental group Mighty Earth, with nearly 250,000 acres deforested from March 2019 to March 2021, three-quarters of which researchers labeled as “possibly illegal.” Joining them high on the list are Bunge and Cargill, U.S.-based producers of soy, 80 percent of which is used as animal feed.

Due to lax enforcement and a permissive legal system, illegally produced goods systematically mix into supply chains. “If the market does not solve a problem itself, then there must be regulation,” said Gerard Rijk, an equity analyst at Profundo, a nonprofit that evaluates sustainability risks in international supply chains. “We see that the market is currently not adjusting quickly enough to get greener.”

Under Bolsonaro, bad actors have been given the green light to do their worst. In Brazil’s Congress, his allies have pushed forward an array of legislation to increase deforestation, like a bill passed by the lower house in August that would allow land grabbers to gain legal title to stolen public lands and immunity from prosecution for past offenses. With a whiff of impunity for the land grabbers, violence stemming from land conflicts soared to the highest levels recorded since tracking began in 1985, and Indigenous groups are the most common target.

Another proposed piece of legislation known as the “Marco Temporal” would invalidate and significantly roll back Indigenous land claims. It is vigorously backed by the agribusiness caucus and Bolsonaro. Trading volume in major agribusiness stocks has spiked dramatically in weeks when these and similar bills have advanced through Congress.

The rules changes, Brazilian environmentalists say, will lower risks and potentially increase returns on investments in the most destructive forms of agribusiness, but at a greater social cost. “The weakening of social and environmental rules in Brazil,” wrote the Forest & Finance Coalition in a letter to financiers in August, “hampers compliance with current and proposed legal requirements related to due diligence in export markets such as the EU and the UK.” The coalition called on financial institutions “to move away from investments that threaten forests and the rights of Indigenous peoples, and thus not contribute further to deforestation and human rights violations in Brazil.”

Greenwashing Brazil

Due to public pressure, many investors and agribusinesses have tried to put forward a more climate-friendly image, issuing promises to shun investments that contribute to deforestation and shift to green-friendly options. Experts have found, however, that these voluntary commitments often do not go far enough, move too slowly, or are simply not followed.

JBS, for example, after being linked to deforestation and slave labor through third-party suppliers, promised to implement supply chain monitoring by 2025 — it had already pledged to reach this goal by 2011 — and go deforestation-free only by 2035. The targets are not legally binding. Major shareholders, including the American financial firms Fidelity Management, Vanguard, and BlackRock, saw net revenue from their investments in JBS exceed $48 billion last year, an all-time high.

As part of its effort to rebrand itself as a company dedicated to “environmental stewardship,” JBS issued a $1 billion “sustainability-linked bond” in June. Investor interest far exceeded supply. This kind of bond is supposed to finance investments that reduce a business’s environmental impact, but JBS didn’t mention deforestation and carved out the company’s supply chain, which produces most of its emissions, according to the environmental group Amazon Watch. An outside analysis commissioned by JBS largely agreed and noted the company did not follow established methodologies.

“We are calling them ‘greenwashing bonds,’” said Merel van der Mark of the deforestation watchdog Forests & Finance, using a term for rebranding ecologically destructive practices as sustainable with marketing.

Rijk, of Profundo, said the problem was common in purportedly environmentally friendly investments: “In green financing, there’s a lot of greenwashing going on.”

One group attempting to develop and promote standards for “sustainable” or “green” finance is a London-based organization called the Climate Bond Initiative, or CBI. The group is funded by many of the financial industry’s heavy hitters, including BlackRock, State Street Global Advisors, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Barclays, and BNP Paribas. It also partners with philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, as well as the Inter-American Development Bank and the European Union.

Though it puts out standards and certifies some bond issuances, CBI does not independently verify or investigate claims. CBI certified bonds are reviewed by third parties, which are commissioned by the bond’s issuer. This setup creates a potential for conflicts of interest akin to the arrangement between issuers of mortgage-backed securities and credit rating agencies that helped spur the 2007 financial crisis, CBI’s CEO Sean Kidney acknowledged to the Financial Times.

JBS is the fourth largest sustainability-linked bond issuer in the Latin America and Caribbean region, according to data from CBI. Most green bond issuers in Brazil, like JBS, do not seek CBI certification and some do not bother with any third-party verification of their green claims, according to the initiative’s data. The terms are voluntary, legally nonbinding, and frequently ignore larger environmental impacts to focus on self-defined narrow metrics of sustainability.

Multiple trade groups that represent BlackRock and other major investors associated with CBI lobbied against mechanisms that would prevent greenwashing and in favor of voluntary, rather than mandatory, standards. “We’re open to both approaches,” said Leisa Souza, CBI’s top official for Latin America. “Of course, we’re not going to say there has to be regulation and this has to be done, because, even if we consider just the market as a whole, you know, self-regulation has worked very well.”

“It’s completely open season. There is currently no robust or binding regulatory framework for what counts as ‘green’ or ‘sustainable,’” said Adrienne Buller, senior research fellow at the think tank Common Wealth. “Private companies get to devise their own rules and designations, and that includes CBI.”

Sustainable Finance and Climate Deniers

Bolsonaro has repeatedly argued that international pressure to protect the Amazon is a veiled attack by foreign nations on Brazil’s sovereignty and its agriculture industry, which he has called “the engine of our economy.” Simultaneously, his administration has worked hard to open the region to foreign capital. CBI partnered with the Bolsonaro government on its plans to expand Brazil’s agricultural capacity and related infrastructure, projecting “$163 billion worth of opportunities” through 2030.

Last June, CBI celebrated the government’s announcement that it intends to issue CBI certified bonds to fund the construction of a grain railway project, known as Ferrogrão, to more efficiently transport soy from the agricultural heartland to a tributary of the Amazon to be loaded onto ships for export — a plan opposed by climate and Indigenous rights activists. In response to these concerns, CBI’s Souza noted that a formal proposal has not yet been submitted yet, so the group has not certified the project. “If this moves forward,” Souza said, “we’re going to consider all the different elements, because, of course, we would not certify something that has a negative impact.”

An analysis by the Climate Policy Initiative think tank determined that, absent government intervention, the Ferrogrão project will dramatically increase demand for land in the affected area — likely to deforest some 1,200 square miles and raise carbon emissions. It will also impact 16 nearby Indigenous communities.

CBI plays an “important” and “very positive” role in fixing the climate crisis, explained Anna Lucia Horta, a former credit analyst at multinational banks and corporations like food giant Cargill, who is now senior finance manager at the Nature Conservancy, a prominent environmental NGO with a billion-dollar annual budget. “They are associated with the government and the goal is to avoid greenwashing,” she told The Intercept.

The Nature Conservancy told The Intercept that “there is no formal collaboration” between them and CBI, but the two organizations have partnered on research and many of the Nature Conservancy’s senior specialists and executives sit on CBI working groups alongside bankers from Goldman Sachs.

“They are partnering with NGOs,” noted Rijk, of Profundo. “That’s not always about greenwashing, but that’s how companies, and also CBI, try to create credibility.”

“These bonds are basically going to business as usual, and these companies get cheaper money this way to expand more.”

CBI would not share its green bonds database with The Intercept, but promotional materials boast of billions of dollars in large sustainability-linked bond issuances from many of Brazil’s most notorious climate destroyers — highlighting a series of industrial agriculture giants. “These bonds are basically going to business as usual, and these companies get cheaper money this way to expand more, and their business model is often inherently problematic,” said Forests & Finance’s van der Mark.

Globally, the “sustainable” bond market reached almost half a trillion dollars this year. So-called ESG mutual funds — short for environmental, social, and corporate governance, which also pick up such investments — surpassed $2.3 trillion in assets.

In March, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched a task force to combat deceptive claims about sustainability.

Financialization Hurts Small Farms

“The barrier to change is access to capital,” said Horta, from the Nature Conservancy. From her point of view, foreign financial institutions are the key to saving the Amazon and the Cerrado because they can encourage the rehabilitation of depleted lands and more sustainable land management by providing financing and incentives for such approaches. “It’s good for everybody,” said Horta, “and it provides food security and climate justice because you’re protecting everybody.”

Longtime advocates of land reform see things differently. “We’ve never had a large-scale agrarian reform,” said Kelli Mafort, member of the national coordinating committee of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, or MST in Portuguese. As Latin America’s largest social movement, MST has fought since 1984 for such reforms: the breakup of massive farms and distribution of unproductive private or stolen public lands to landless peasants to perform small-scale, collective, organic agriculture.

The top 0.04 percent of farms — 2,400 in all — are larger than the 4.1 million smallest farms combined, 81.3 percent, according to recent government data. The small-scale family farms, including those run by MST, have an outsized role in producing the food that Brazilians actually eat, while the massive factory farms are disproportionately focused on monoculture of exportable cash crops, like soy and beef, as well as sugar cane and corn for ethanol production. Despite record harvests, Brazilians are increasingly going hungry: 19 million Brazilians were unable to put food on the table last year, and 117 million more — most of the country — face food insecurity.

Mafort sees the increased role of speculative foreign capital as a direct threat to the agrarian reform and broader social justice movement that she and her colleagues fight for. It has driven up land prices, accelerated conflict, and led to the push for laws like the land grabbing bill.

Since 2000, foreign investors have bought over 11,000 square miles of Brazilian farmland, an area larger than the state of Massachusetts, according to a report by Chain Reaction Research, a think tank focused on deforestation and commodities. Among the major buyers are the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, known as TIAA, and Harvard University. These foreign-owned farms have deforested an area larger than Rhode Island from 2000 to 2017. Major agricultural players have approached land speculation by foreign capital as a lucrative new business. Farmland prices have doubled and tripled in recent years.

“It is a privatization of agrarian reform,” said Mafort. She pointed to recent legislation that allows landowners to break their farms into parcels and use the fragments as collateral against loans, making it easier to get a loan, riskier to take one on, and easier to get dispossessed if you default.

The big farms will get the money they need at better rates, and smaller operations will be pushed to the brink of insolvency.

“It is an absurdly large risk for an activity that already is extremely risky,” warned Anderson Belloli, legal director of Federarroz, a rice growers association. “Open-air industry is very susceptible to climate and price problems.” Unlike soy, rice is grown mostly in Brazil’s extreme south by relatively small producers and almost entirely for domestic consumption. While the soy farmers are making a killing with their dollarized exports, rice farmers are largely struggling to scrape by.

Belloli said that the producers of this national staple crop have always had a hard time acquiring credit at reasonable rates. As government lenders which have traditionally dominated the market step back and are replaced by private banks, he thinks the situation will only get worse: The big farms will get the money they need at better rates, and smaller operations will be pushed to the brink of insolvency. “This is worrying, because the trend will be to increasingly concentrate land in the hands of those who really are large-scale producers,” said Belloli. “This evidently has a very significant social cost.” Brazil’s government projects a 60 percent reduction in rice cultivation by 2030. Beans and cassava, the nation’s other staples, will also decline.

Even some advocates for financialization say more needs to be done to prevent consolidation of wealth. Horta, from the Nature Conservancy, agreed that without additional measures in place, wealth concentration is inevitable. “If you’re going to just have financialization, money is going to flow to the better credit risk always and that’s the big ones.”

The post How Your 401(k) Is Helping Destroy the Amazon Rainforest appeared first on The Intercept.

General Motors was the largest corporation in the United States on November 11, 1969, when one of its employees, retired Brazilian air force Col. Evaldo Herbert Sirin, walked into the local headquarters of the Brazilian military dictatorship’s political police force. Sirin was there to meet with an army major and the local political police boss, as well as security chiefs from American companies Chrysler and Firestone, the Netherlands’s Philips, and Germany’s Volkswagen, among others.

The group was gathering amid a backdrop of dissatisfaction among industrial workers because of wages that weren’t keeping up with galloping inflation and new anti-labor government policies. In the streets and countryside, strikes and protests shook the regime, and small bands of leftists had taken up arms. The military cracked down against its opponents with overwhelming force. It was the onset of the “Years of Lead,” the most authoritarian and bloody period of the military regime that began in 1964 and lasted until 1985.

The “working group,” as the men gathered at the local political police headquarters called themselves, was concerned about “problems” at their factories. The corporate representatives were eager to intensify the formal but clandestine collaboration between the corporations and the police to identify and neutralize any troublemakers, according to documents first published by the newspaper O Globo decades later. That day, they would establish a “coordination center” at the political police headquarters.

The November 11, 1969, meeting — notorious in the annals of history but largely forgotten in the public consciousness — was a milestone in the systematization of the repressive alliance between corporate bosses and the Brazilian generals.

In workplaces across the country, corporate security departments, run by military men who employed networks of spies on shop floors, would surveil their workers and hand over files on “subversives” — leftists and labor organizers — for the political police to handle.

Among the more than 80 corporations secretly reporting hundreds of troublemaking workers to the dictatorship’s enforcers were giant American companies.

Among the more than 80 corporations secretly reporting hundreds of troublemaking workers to the dictatorship’s enforcers were giant international and particularly American companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, Kodak, General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Philips, Volkswagen, Rolls-Royce, and Mercedes-Benz, according to the Brazilian National Truth Commission established after the dictatorship.

Corporations, which also provided the initial private seed funding for another, more brutal repressive secret police force, aimed to curtail workers’ rights and restrain democracy when it got in the way of profits and power. The dictatorship, in need of investment from abroad to prop up the economy, was happy to serve the interests of foreign capital.

At least 434 people were murdered under the dictatorship, and 20,000 more were tortured, including former President Dilma Rousseff. The torture chambers were funded by corporations, including American ones, and the torturers were trained by the U.S. Army. Only one person was ever convicted for the abuses, and the ruling was only handed down this June. And only one company was formally held accountable: Volkswagen, which in 2020 admitted its wrongdoing and made a settlement agreement with prosecutors to pay millions in restitution in exchange for immunity.

Echoes Today

The unresolved bloody past hangs over Brazil as the nation ramps up for presidential elections slated to take place in October 2022.

President Jair Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper, has never hidden his longing to return to the U.S.-backed military dictatorship or his unquestioning admiration for the regime’s worst villains, like secret police chief and torturer Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra.

The neoliberal economic agenda that accompanied Bolsonaro’s authoritarian vision was embraced by global financial elites and large swaths of the media, like the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Others were more reserved in their support. Bolsonaro quickly filled his administration with more generals, colonels, and majors than any president since re-democratization and dredged up unfinished plans from the dictatorship. Like his military predecessors, he moved to make Brazil more attractive for foreign investors. Bolsonaro’s presidency has been a three-year parade of horrors: the attrition of social spending, labor rights, real wages, democratic institutions, and essential regulations, all while hunger, unemployment, and inflation soar.

The Bolsonaro era has been a rude reminder that Brazil’s darkest moments have always been the result of multinational corporate elites aligning with the military to crush democratic movements supposedly in the name of saving democracy. The alternative, his supporters have dubiously alleged, would invite the left-leaning Workers’ Party to turn Brazil into a communist dictatorship worse than Cuba, the same story that was used to justify the 1964 coup.

The revival of a dark history represented by Bolsonaro also informs his 2022 opponent’s past. In the 1980s, Volkswagen handed the dictatorship’s police a file based on surveillance of a regional labor activist named Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, who would go on to serve as president from 2003 to 2010, had been surveilled by the German car manufacturer and was arbitrarily arrested by the dictatorship for leading a strike. In 2018, he was again jailed under dubious circumstances on corruption charges that were subsequently vacated but prevented him from running for president in that year’s election. The 76-year-old politician is free now and again leads in the polls.

Conditions this time around are not dissimilar from those surrounding Lula’s 2002 victory. Then, Lula bolstered his reputation as a fighter for the working class and secured alliances with oligarch parties to alleviate a severe economic crisis without resorting to radical policies. Today, he again looks to forge such alliances and still maintains a loyal following among many of Brazil’s poor. The elite class, though, overwhelmingly turned its back on the Workers’ Party to support Bolsonaro in 2018 to roll back the party’s legacy of social programs and tighter regulations.

Today, Brazil’s elite is split. Some still openly or tentatively support the president, while many have abandoned him over his turn away from some neoliberal economic policies, sagging poll numbers, and internal rivalries. Among the defectors, a few are in tentative backroom negotiations with Lula, but most are instead advocating a “third way” candidate who would adhere to their neoliberal economic vision without all the baggage of Bolsonaro. As things stand, neither Bolsonaro nor this “third way” has the popularity to win a democratic election.

These elites, in almost the exact manner of their predecessors in the run-up to the 1964 coup, employ a careful language of liberalism, democracy, incremental reforms, and anti-corruption. Behind the rhetoric, though, are deeply reactionary objectives. It was a winning strategy in 2016 when it was used to impeach Rousseff on trumped-up charges, and it worked again with Operation Car Wash, the now-discredited “anti-corruption” crusade that led to Lula’s imprisonment.

There is much for the corporate interests to protect: Today, the top 1 percent owns half of Brazil’s wealth. And there are reasons — growing food insecurity and Congress’s disinterest in a populist program, for example — for those interests to be worried about what a shifting democratic wave might bring.

Brazilian Elites’ Choice

In Brazil, most historians do not refer to the period from 1964 to 1985 as a “military dictatorship” but rather as a “civil-military dictatorship” — due to the leading role that domestic and multinational corporate elites played every step of the way. U.S. corporations like IBM, Shell, and Coca-Cola poured millions into far-right anti-communists nonprofits that, according to the National Truth Commission, were essential to planning and propagandizing for the coup. The corporations lobbied the U.S. government to support the coup, and it did — even going so far as to send a U.S. Navy task force loaded with supplies off the coast to support the plotters.

Brazilian elites must decide whether they want to finish the job they started in 1969 or 2002.

The 1964 coup that overthrew President João Goulart was orchestrated, with CIA help, by elites who almost certainly would have supported Bolsonaro in 2018 and today would likely be leaning toward a “third way” candidate. One such candidate — who formally joined a political party Wednesday, the first official step in a run for president — is disgraced former Car Wash Judge Sergio Moro, who put Lula in jail and then joined the Bolsonaro administration. Eventually, with his own naked political ambitions on display, Moro left the government over differences of opinion.

For years, Moro was portrayed as a superhero in “anti-corruption” street protests organized by right-wing groups with murky finances and U.S. ties that purported to be apolitical and moderate but went on to promote divisive conservative culture war issues and a radical libertarian economic agenda. The corporate-backed nonprofits behind the coup made a similar effort to originally hide their more radical goals.

Brazilian leftists, understandably, are just as hostile to Moro and anyone who supported him as they are to Bolsonaro. They loathe the U.S.-supported Car Wash investigation, which wreaked havoc on Brazil’s domestic petroleum and construction sectors, led to mass layoffs, and opened the way for privatizations of profitable state assets. Operation Car Wash “might have been the biggest tool to forge the neoliberal agenda” in Brazil, Rousseff told Brasil de Fato last year.

Next year’s election will turn on whether Brazil’s right-wing elites, which have been on a tear for the last six years, will be able to regroup and coalesce behind a strategy to again block the Workers’ Party through undemocratic means or if enough of them are willing to change course and come to a tentative truce with Lula. The elites must decide whether they want to finish the job they started in 1969 or 2002.

The post During Brazil’s Dictatorship, Companies Helped Suppress Democracy. Will They Do It Again? appeared first on The Intercept.

“Sen. Gillibrand has refused for a long time to even investigate my unprecedented Chevron-orchestrated detention, much less speak out about it.”

The senator has received $191,101 from Gibson Dunn’s PAC, lawyers, and their spouses in direct contributions and through her Off the Sidelines PAC — nearly half of which came from attorneys who worked to discredit Donziger on behalf of Chevron. Gillibrand, a former corporate lawyer, was the beneficiary of several fundraisers at the Gibson Dunn offices organized by Jennifer H. Rearden, a partner at the firm’s litigation and crisis management groups who also worked on the case.

“Sen. Gillibrand has refused for a long time to even investigate my unprecedented Chevron-orchestrated detention, much less speak out about it,” Donziger told The Intercept. “Obviously, the senator’s extensive connections to big-money donors with ties to Chevron might be affecting her decision to ignore what is an obvious human rights violation on U.S. soil involving one of her constituents.”

Gillibrand, Gibson Dunn, and Rearden did not respond to requests for comment.

Gillibrand played a crucial role in the nomination of Rearden — who fundraised at Gibson Dunn for the senator’s campaigns — to serve on the federal bench.

Last year, then-President Donald Trump nominated Rearden to serve as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, the same court where Donziger has suffered multiple defeats at the hands of judges who have been criticized for having conflicts in the case. In a sworn affidavit submitted during the nomination process and recently obtained by The Intercept, Rearden stated that her yearslong road to the nomination began when she expressed interest to Gillibrand in one of many talks about the issue with the senator and her staff. Rearden was among 26 failed Trump nominees who did not receive a Senate confirmation vote.

In the affidavit, Rearden disclosed that she “co-hosted several fundraisers” for Gillibrand at the Gibson Dunn offices, where her role included “arranging for the use of Gibson Dunn space, inviting Gibson Dunn attorneys (and sometimes others), and asking invitees to make a donation.”

Along the way, Rearden made 11 donations totaling $30,900 to Gillibrand and her Off the Sidelines PAC, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. Rearden also contributed $10,500 to six candidates backed by Off the Sidelines and hosted a fundraiser for Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who was supported by the political action committee.

“When it looks as if there’s a quid pro quo relationship happening between a politician and their donors, the appearance of that corruption can be just as damaging as corruption itself,” said Alex Baumgart, a researcher at Open Secrets. “In this instance, it’s clear that there’s a concerted effort to target specific members with campaign contributions,” Baumgart added, “but it’s impossible to know for certain whether that support materializes into tangible gains for the corporation.”

In an opinion issued last month, a United Nations human rights panel said it was “appalled” by the federal court’s treatment of Donziger. It called for his immediate release from more than two years of pretrial house arrest, which it classified as “arbitrary” and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Last Friday, federal Judge Loretta Preska sentenced Donziger to six months in prison for contempt of court charges stemming from his refusal to turn over his electronic devices to Chevron lawyers, citing his obligation to protect attorney-client privilege. Preska allowed Donziger to remain under house arrest pending his appeal of denial of bail, which his lawyers are expected to file this week.

Donziger is one of the lawyers responsible for winning a $9.5 billion ruling in 2011 against Chevron in an Ecuadorian court over significant environmental damage that harmed Amazonian farmers and Indigenous communities. A Chevron lawyer promised, “We’re going to fight this until hell freezes over, and then we’ll fight it on the ice” — and the company hired Gibson Dunn to lead the charge.

In 2014, Chevron won a major victory when a U.S. federal court blocked the Ecuadorian claimants from collecting on the judgment in the U.S. The judge also found Donziger to be guilty of misconduct, which he denies, and led to his disbarment in New York and the contempt charges.

A New York resident, Donziger and his allies have lobbied Gillibrand and his two other congressional representatives, House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. — whose son works for Gibson Dunn — and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to intervene on his behalf, but they have remained silent. Schumer has received over $1 million in donations from Chevron-affiliated law firms, including Gibson Dunn. In contrast, other congressional Democrats — just not Donziger’s own representatives — have called for the Justice Department to review the case.

Baumgart, of Open Secrets, said the ties between the politicians and Chevron could diminish public trust: “The public’s confidence in their elected official’s ability to act independently is undermined when they perceive them as acting in the interest of corporate donors.”

Update: October 7, 2021, 1:10 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to specify that Preska, the judge, allowed Donziger to stay under house arrest pending his appeal of denial of bail, not a wider appeal to the rulings in the case.

The post Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Has Deep Ties to Chevron Lawyers Leading Legal Attacks on Steven Donziger appeared first on The Intercept.

While some progressives lawmakers have spoken out about Donziger’s case, many of the Democratic Party’s power brokers have shied away. Donziger has pointed to Democrats like House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, of New York, who hasn’t said anything about his case. Several of the prominent Democrats harbor close ties to the law firms defending Chevron: chief among them Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, the corporate firm where Nadler’s son is an associate.

“Jerry Nadler’s silence reflects a sad lack of commitment to human rights protections in the United States of America.”

“Jerry Nadler’s silence reflects a sad lack of commitment to human rights protections in the United States of America,” Donziger told The Intercept. “Worse, it appears to be the result of rank hypocrisy: His son works at the same Chevron law firm that has reaped massive fees for attacking me and trying to ruin my life, which is in and of itself a gross human rights violation.”

Dan Rubin, a spokesperson for Nadler, said the representative’s son has no role in the Donziger case and that Nadler does not comment on ongoing cases. Neither Chevron nor Gibson Dunn responded to requests for comment.

Donziger, an attorney who won a landmark, multibillion-dollar 2011 ruling against Chevron in Ecuadorian courts, is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday in a New York federal court for six charges of criminal contempt of court, all misdemeanors. He faces up to six months in prison after having already spent an unprecedented 787 days, by the day of his sentencing, on house arrest. Federal courts have never before ordered the pretrial detention of a lawyer without a criminal record for a misdemeanor charge.

The sentencing marks another turn in the long saga of Donziger’s court battles with Chevron. The July contempt convictions stem from Donziger’s refusal to obey a judge’s order to turn over his electronic devices to Chevron on the grounds that it would irreversibly violate the rights of his clients, Ecuadorian Indigenous groups and farmers whose Amazonian communities have been polluted by oil drilling.

Rather than pay for the cleanup and damages in Ecuador, Chevron instead hired a battalion of corporate lawyers to go on the counteroffensive and, in its consultants’ own words, “demonize” Donziger.

In 2014, Chevron convinced a federal judge in New York to take the controversial step of invalidating the 2011 ruling from an Ecuadorian court based on their argument that Donziger rigged the outcome through racketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. The key witness against Donziger has publicly retracted his testimony and Donziger, for his part, denies the accusations, arguing that judges in this case and his contempt hearing are both biased by their own ties to Chevron.

Nadler Silent

The support from House progressives came in April, when six members, led by Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., requested that Attorney General Merrick Garland review the proceedings. “We have deep concerns that the unprecedented nature of Mr. Donziger’s pending legal case is tied to his previous work against Chevron,” read the letter also signed by Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., among others. “It is vital that attorneys working on behalf of victims of human rights violations and negative environmental impacts of corporations not become criminalized for their work.”

Five months later, Garland has not responded, McGovern’s office told The Intercept. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

Nadler — Donziger’s own representative — was notably absent.

Nadler had been approached multiple times to lend support to a review of the case against Donziger, said two sources with knowledge of the entreaties, who asked for anonymity because they were not permitted to speak about the dealings. Donziger and his allies have repeatedly attempted to convince Nadler to investigate the case. Last September, Donziger sent an open letter to Nadler backed by 24,000 signatures from concerned citizens but did not receive a response.

Nadler’s son, Michael, joined Gibson Dunn, the main firm representing Chevron, as an associate attorney in 2018 and has represented extractive industry clients like the Rio Tinto mining firm for its operations in Mozambique. Human Rights Watch has published a 130-page report on how Rio Tinto has contributed to food insecurity, poverty, and water shortages among communities it had resettled for its mines.

Throughout the senior Nadler’s congressional career, lawyers and law firms have been his top campaign funders, according to the watchdog Open Secrets. He has received over $2 million in donations from lawyers and law firms, including $85,650 from Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP, one of dozens of firms hired by Chevron on the Donziger case. Nadler has also received campaign donations from three Gibson Dunn partners totaling $4,750.

Rubin, the Nadler spokesperson, said, “Federal criminal cases should be free of political influence. Because Congressman Nadler chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has direct responsibility for the Department of Justice, he does not comment on the merits of any active prosecution, including that of Mr. Donzinger [sic].”

In January, Nadler appeared to break his own rule by urging the Justice Department to move aggressively in the open cases of the January 6 Capitol rioters in a statement co-signed with other committee chairs.

Tough to Rally Support

Paul Paz y Miño, an associate director at the nonprofit Amazon Watch who has closely followed the Chevron cases for over a decade and has advocated on Donziger’s behalf, said that it’s been extremely difficult to get members of Congress to speak up.

“It’s a heavy lift to overcome the amount of mud and dirt that Chevron has spent millions of dollars to throw on top of Donziger,” Paz y Miño told The Intercept. “Some members of Congress immediately backed off and we know that Chevron had their lobbyists on the Hill trying to counter the work that we were doing.”

“It kind of blew my mind that Jerry Nadler’s office refused to even respond to anything.”

“It kind of blew my mind that Jerry Nadler’s office refused to even respond to anything,” said Paz y Miño, who believes that Nadler’s position has discouraged other members of Congress who have expressed interest in Donziger’s case. “The first question they often ask is, ‘Well, who’s their actual rep?’ And then the answer is, ‘Oh, it’s Nadler,’ and it would die pretty much right there,” he said.

Donziger and his allies have also lobbied his two senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, to speak out on his behalf, but they have not done so. Neither office responded to requests for comment.

Prior to running for Congress, Gillibrand was a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, which would later work on behalf of Chevron in the case against Donziger. Like Nadler, Gillibrand’s top donors are lawyers, who have given her $8.8 million. She and her PAC, Off the Sidelines, have received over $190,000 in donations from Gibson Dunn. At least five other corporate law firms that have worked for Chevron are among her top all-time donors.

Schumer has received nearly $10 million in donations from the legal industry, including at least $1 million from Chevron-linked law firms — $61,255 of which came from Gibson Dunn.

Correction: October 7, 2021
An earlier version of this story misstated the total donation figures from Gibson Dunn to Gillibrand and Schumer. 

The post Rep. Jerry Nadler, Whose Son Works for Chevron’s Lawyers, Is Silent on Steven Donziger Case appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s no coincidence that the first decree under Brazil’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship was called “Operation Cleanse.” The diktat, issued in 1964, as the generals took power, initiated a witch hunt to remove leftists and other political opponents from positions of power and began two decades of brutal political repression that included censorship, mass arrests, torture, rape, and assassinations.

Brazil’s far right is calling back to that history, without the wink-and-nod, to restore their order at the expense of democracy. The hard right believes that, since the military relinquished control in 1985, Brazil has deteriorated. A rejuvenated “communism,” they say, must again be purged, resisted, and battled back by any means possible.

In online groups for organizing the September 7 rally, the zeal for undoing democratic institutions was on full display. Pro-Bolsonaro activists, for instance, offered suggestions for banners: “Remove all the Supreme Court ministers,” one read, while another said, “Activate the Armed Forces.” If things line up, Bolsonaro will gaze on these slogans in person: He will reportedly speak at the rallies in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and Brasília, the capital. Other smaller events will occur across the country as well.

The posturing of pro-Bolsonaro figures ahead of the September 7 rally feels not unlike the run-up to the January 6 Capitol riot in Washington, D.C., which aimed to overturn the electoral defeat of President Donald Trump on the spurious grounds of mass electoral fraud. There’s a president with waning popularity, a fervent, gun-loving minority that sees defeat as an impossibility, and a pulsing desperation making them ready to take matters into their own hands.

Whether Bolsonaro will manage to topple Brazilian democracy and keep himself in power remains to be seen, but September 7 is already shaping up to be a bold step in that direction.

Whether Bolsonaro and his supporters will manage to topple Brazilian democracy and keep him in power remains to be seen, but September 7 is already shaping up to be a bold step in that direction.

While large nationwide protests and pro-coup messaging in Brazil are hardly new, Bolsonaro’s declining political prospects and escalating attacks against the Supreme Court suggest that September 7 could portend a more serious threat to Brazil’s 35-year-old democracy.

Rep. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son and a former Federal Police officer, has served as an unofficial ambassador to Trump World in recent years and was in Washington, D.C.. meetings with Trump’s inner circle before and after the Capitol riot. Eduardo is also close with Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who is under investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police for his suspected role in attacks on the country’s electoral system. The two appear to have been studying the American case to learn from past mistakes. One example of this process may be that, in Brazil, they’re making their move long before the election itself.

Pro-Democracy Coup?

Trump framed his actions not as an attack on democracy, but as a defense of it — a violation of the Constitution to save the Constitution. “You’re protecting our country and you’re protecting the Constitution,” he told the crowd on January 6, before they marched on the Capitol to impede Congress from executing duties mandated by the Constitution. “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules,” Trump said.

This is the standard tactic of right-wing coups for decades, as outlined in Vincent Bevins’ book “The Jakarta Method”: Invent a left-wing coup plot and launch a “countercoup” to prevent it. We didn’t have a choice, they’d argue: Extreme measures were required to save the country.

Bolsonaro is following a similar logic, replete with the same lies about electoral fraud. He has claimed publicly that the event is a “pro-democracy” rally focused primarily on “freedom of speech,” echoing tropes used by far-right extremists worldwide when they are on the defensive, but that rings hollow once you examine their true authoritarian platform. Like Trump, Bolsonaro says fraud is rife — he’s repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that even his landslide 2018 win was amid a fraudulent election — and that if Brazil does not change its voting system for 2022, he will not accept the results. And there are whiffs of Trump’s complaints about the deep state: Bolsonaro has argued that his movement is being persecuted by the Supreme Court.

Despite all the democracy talk, however, coup-mongering remains at the top of Bolsonaro’s agenda. “An opportunity for the Brazilian people has never been so important — or will be so important — as this coming September 7,” he told a crowd last week. “Many want me to take certain measures. I believe that we are going to change the destiny of Brazil.” Eventually, he added a meager reference to the constitution — a constitution that, written in the wake of the dictatorship, many of Bolsonaro’s diehard supporters view as a communist document that must be replaced.

“Things will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do.”

In a 1999 TV interview, Bolsonaro, a member of Congress at the time, notoriously called for a civil war — with greater bloodletting than even the dictatorship era. “Through the vote, you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! Things will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do,” he said, going on to explicitly call for the killing of tens of thousands. “If some innocent people are going to die, fine. In any war, innocents die.”

Like Trump, Bolsonaro’s approach to the election is borne out of a precarious political situation. Just as Trump’s was, Bolsonaro’s election campaign is beset by investigations into improprieties and declining popularity.

At least five federal investigations are closing in on Bolsonaro and his family, not to mention his political associates. A steady trickle of his allies have already been arrested for anti-democratic incitement, corruption, and more. Public opinion polls show that only about 24 percent of Brazilians approve of Bolsonaro, but that hardcore base appears to be unshakeable. Evangelicals, police, wealthy farmers, and truckers are among the core constituencies that are mobilizing their bases to attend the September 7 rally, even as some financial elites have begun to turn their backs on the president.

The desperation might suggest the September 7 would-be preemptive coup is more bark than bite.

1964 or January 6?

Could Brazil’s September 7 movement succeed like the military coup in 1964, or will it fail like Trump’s attack on the Capitol? Important structural elements suggest the latter. In 1964, the generals, crucially, had the unified weight of the U.S. government, Brazil’s economic elite, and the media on their side. Popular opposition was scattered and weak. Now, not so much.

The U.S. has never been shy about supporting undemocratic right-wing thugs in Latin America, but the Biden administration has also been no friend of Bolsonaro, who openly supported Trump’s reelection. During an August visit to Brasília, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly told Bolsonaro to stop attempting to undermine the election process. But the U.S. has its own pragmatic interests to pursue in Brazil, namely, stemming China’s increasing influence, and a pro-U.S. regime that idolizes American culture can be mighty useful.

The economic elite, who largely backed Bolsonaro on the hopes that he would push through a raft of neoliberal economic reforms, have slowly begun to begrudgingly jump off the bandwagon.

The economic elite, who largely backed Bolsonaro on the hopes that he would push through a raft of neoliberal economic reforms, have slowly begun to begrudgingly jump off the bandwagon. The timing suggests that they weren’t turned off by the tidal wave of corruption revelations, the bigoted and genocidal policies, or the intentional spread of Covid-19 that has so far killed more than half a million Brazilians. Instead, the deciding factor appears to be economic self-interest: Brazil is doing worse than other nations economically under Bolsonaro, his government has not delivered on many of its promises, and the government incompetence and aggressive style has deterred foreign investors.

While many of Brazil’s oligarchs recently made public statements about defending democracy, it’s hard to believe that they would reject military rule if they believed it would make them wealthier and more powerful. Despite the recent remarks, the elite families of Brazil have a spotty record on supporting democracy. They eagerly supported undemocratic measures to thwart center-left politicians in 2016 and 2018 and profited greatly off the anti-worker repression of the 1964 coup.

And, of course, a not-insignificant chunk of the economic elite are diehard Bolsonaro supporters themselves, namely much of the agribusiness, mining, and timber sectors. These industries rely on Bolsonaro-approved land theft, Amazon destruction, wage slavery, and lax environmental enforcement. Big agribusiness lobbies are some of the principal financiers of the September 7 movement.

Brazil’s major journalistic institutions follow a similar logic. Many outlets have been obsequious to Bolsonaro’s agenda and rewarded for their efforts with heaps of government ad buys. And as in the Trump era, other major corporate media institutions have hissed at Bolsonaro’s boorish ways and spoken out “in defense of democracy” against attempts to discredit their industry as “fake news.” And yet Bolsonaro’s regressive economic agenda has been roundly supported by the mainstream press. These powerful outlets are unlikely to sign on for a coup led by a man who paints them as an enemy but might quickly change their tune if it were to succeed.

The military remains something of an enigma and is the key player in determining how far all of this coup talk will go. The generals have a clear ideological affinity for Bolsonaro’s vision and have been rewarded with great power in his administration, even if some have personal misgivings about the man himself. These are, however, also cautious, guarded men, eager to preserve their lavish benefits packages and plum positions. The president enjoys wide support among the military rank-and-file, though, as well as among the militarized police forces, a fact that has troubled opponents.

As for Bolsonaro himself, the message is clear: “I have three alternatives for my future: prison, death, or victory,” Bolsonaro said last week at an event with evangelical leaders. “You can be sure the first alternative doesn’t exist. I’m doing the right thing and I owe nothing to anyone. Wherever the people have been, I’ve been.” There is no subtlety here: He is saying that he will not accept impeachment or democratic defeat at the ballot box and is willing to die trying to stay in power.

The post Jair Bolsonaro’s Pro-Coup Rally: September 7 Is Shaping Up to Be Brazil’s January 6 appeared first on The Intercept.

The umbrella group Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, or APIB, put together the protests as part of the weeklong “Struggle for Life” protest in the capital, Brasília, in anticipation of a decision from the Supreme Court that could invalidate Indigenous land claims.

“Our struggle takes as its target all governments that are complicit in Bolsonaro’s campaign of genocide, all corporations that seek to profit from it,” APIB said in a joint statement with Progressive International, a left-wing coalition that sent a delegation to survey the situation. “The fight against Bolsonaro extends far beyond the borders of Brazil.”

“We are the ones suffering. The government doesn’t suffer. So that’s why we’re here to fight.”

APIB expected the Supreme Court would strike down a challenge to Indigenous land claims during its protest, but the court postponed the judgment to next week after one vote was cast in favor of Indigenous rights. One right-wing lawmaker, whose fortune comes from agriculture, said he and his colleagues lobbied the justices to further delay the ruling so that Congress has time to pass measures that would strip Indigenous land rights through legislation instead of the courts.

Since 2019, Bolsonaro has used his executive authority to aggressively attack Indigenous rights, slash environmental protections, and cripple relevant law enforcement efforts — moves that have drawn international condemnation. Closely aligned with the powerful agribusiness lobby, the government has also pushed forward a slew of consequential bills in Congress that, if passed, would be a death sentence for many of Brazil’s Indigenous communities and, critics warn, the entire Amazon rainforest.

“We are the ones suffering. The government doesn’t suffer,” said Pasyma Panará, president of the Iakiô Association in the Xingu region of the Amazon. “So that’s why we’re here to fight.”

The delegation from Progressive International included a member of the Spanish parliament, Indigenous leaders, labor activists, and two U.S. congressional staffers who were participating in a personal capacity. The group traveled to Brasília and the Amazonian cities of Belém and Santarém for a week of meetings with Brazilian politicians and environmentalists and groups representing Indigenous communities, labor, and landless peasants.

“This delegation aims to bring the eyes of the world to Brazil,” David Adler, general coordinator of Progressive International, told The Intercept. “We are here to develop a common strategy to confront the crises that are facing Brazil.”

Struggle for Life

More than 6,000 representatives of 176 Indigenous groups pitched tents and lashed together bamboo shelters for seven days of protest and cultural exchange. The encampment sat on a dusty patch of land in the capital, less than a mile up the main promenade from Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace.

To participate, delegates from the most far-flung corners of Brazil’s massive expanses spent as many as three days on packed buses that navigated washed-out dirt roads, traveling under the threat of ambushes from paramilitary gangs.

Before rousing speeches by movement leaders and allies could begin on the main stage, groups of Xikrin, Munduruku, Xukuru, and others dressed in full ceremonial regalia and performed traditional dances and songs for the crowd. Tech-savvy Indigenous influencers and journalists livestreamed the proceedings on social media, engulfed in plumes of red dust.

“We know what evil is. Evil is the agribusiness invading our territories.”

“We know what evil is,” said one speaker to applause. “Evil is the agribusiness invading our territories.”

Brazil’s Indigenous people have no shortage of reasons to protest. Their ancestral lands are increasingly threatened by major agricultural infrastructure projects and violent land thieves aided by government agencies. Violent attacks are on the rise and environmental degradation is making traditional ways of life less tenable.

Meanwhile, Congress has been voting on one bill after another that would undo the hard-fought protections written into the 1988 constitution. Under Bolsonaro, everything has gone from bad to worse.

For weeks, organizers have been primarily focused on the Supreme Court decision that could substantially reduce constitutionally protected Indigenous territories. “It is one of the most important judgments in history,” said APIB leader Sônia Guajajara, in a livestreamed event last Thursday. “The struggle of Indigenous peoples is a struggle for the future of humanity.”

The measure, known as the “Milestone Thesis,” or “Marco Temporal” in Portuguese, would invalidate the land claims of Indigenous groups that did not physically occupy the territory on the day the new constitution was signed in 1988, ignoring centuries of genocidal oppression that forced many tribes to flee their ancestral homes.

Indigenous land rights are enshrined in Brazil’s Constitution, but the government has moved at a snail’s pace over the last three decades to process claims. Meanwhile, Brazil’s agribusiness, mining, and lumber industries, with their international backers, have their eyes on many of the vast tracts of land, mostly located in the Amazon, that are claimed by natives. The business interests have been chipping away at the protections by any means necessary in the courts, in Congress, and on the ground.

Illegal invasions into Indigenous lands by violent, heavily armed groups have been on the rise in recent years. Criminal groups have been emboldened by Bolsonaro, who campaigned on the promise that, if elected president, “there won’t be a centimeter demarcated for Indigenous reserves” and has made racist, genocidal comments about Indigenous peoples throughout his career.

“The Marco Temporal represents for us, Indigenous peoples, a declaration of extermination,” said Eloy Terena, a lawyer and Indigenous rights activist, during an event last Thursday. Terena pointed out that many of Brazil’s 114 uncontacted tribes, which rely on government protection, live in territories that could be threatened if the Marco Temporal legal thesis is upheld.

Fight for Representation

The only way to put the brakes on the tractors that are plowing through the Amazon, Rep. Joênia Wapichana told The Intercept, is a “political renewal.” Indigenous people and their allies must “attain the majority within Congress,” she said, something that has never happened. “Maybe that way they might think twice before putting forward a proposal to reduce Indigenous rights.”

Wapichana, 47, is Brazil’s first female Indigenous lawyer and member of Congress. She is currently the country’s sole Indigenous representative. At the “Struggle for Life” protest, she got the rockstar treatment: Wherever she went, adoring fans lined up to snag selfies.

In a meeting with a dozen leaders from some of Brazil’s hardest-hit Indigenous communities, a Progressive International delegate asked which politicians they considered solid allies. The group hesitated to respond, whispering among themselves until one of them spoke up: “Rep. Joênia has fought alongside us a lot,” one Indigenous leader said, going on to name a handful of nongovernmental organizations. None of them were from Wapichana’s state of Roraima. Any other names? This time the answer was quick: “No, not that I remember.”

“Agribusiness not only buys advertising, it also buys the editorial line and influences news coverage.”

The Mixed Parliamentary Front in Defense of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, launched in 2019 by Wapichana, is comprised of 237 of Brazil’s 594 members of Congress. But during the first four days of the protest, only two federal elected representatives stepped foot on the protest’s main stage and only a handful visited the encampment. No major presidential hopefuls or prominent government officials attended.

In a change from recent Indigenous protests — which ended in violent repression — police kept their distance. Coverage from major national news outlets has also been hard to come by. On Wednesday, APIB’s executive coordinator Dinamam Tuxá lamented to The Intercept that none of the three main newspapers in Brazil — which rely on agribusiness advertising — had yet run a cover story on the historic protest. “Agribusiness not only buys advertising,” he said, “it also buys the editorial line and influences news coverage.”

International Solidarity

Even if the Marco Temporal is defeated in the Supreme Court, dozens of other proposals and government actions threaten Indigenous lands and serve to push the Amazon rainforest closer to a deforestation “tipping point.” The result would be an irrevocable collapse of the ecosystem.

Leading scientists believe that the tipping point will come at 20 to 25 percent deforestation, causing the lush Amazon to dry up and turn into a savanna, provoking catastrophic carbon emissions and severe droughts throughout the continent. Eighteen percent of the Amazon has already been cut down and the rate of destruction has only increased under Bolsonaro.

“Our lives are at risk and we are asking for help,” Auricélia Arapium, a native leader from the Tapajós region, told the Progressive International delegation during a meeting at the encampment on Monday. “We no longer have anyone to turn to in Brazil. That’s why we have approached international organizations, so that our rights, which are being threatened, are preserved.”

In a press conference later that day, Progressive International announced that it plans to work with partners around the globe to launch a boycott of foreign companies responsible for the destruction of the Amazon and the trampling of Indigenous rights. The investment giant Blackstone and the private agricultural conglomerate Cargill are at the top of their list.

“We need to look at the corporations that are fueling this and the U.S. and international foreign policy that’s enabling these corporations,” said Nick Estes, a professor at the University of New Mexico, a Progressive International delegate, and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

“The practices of these corporations like Cargill are fundamentally racist,” said Estes, who has contributed to The Intercept. “If more people understood how much Indigenous blood, how much Black blood, how much blood from Brazilians living on the land is spilt just for them to have a cheeseburger, I think there would be much more outrage.”

The post Brazil’s Indigenous Groups Mount Unprecedented Protest Against Destruction of the Amazon appeared first on The Intercept.

The raft of controversial reforms being pushed by allies of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro would constitute the most sweeping revision to the country’s complicated electoral system since the 1988 Constitution was put in place.

The proposals include measures that would legalize or reduce punishment for multiple forms of corruption and voter intimidation; weaken measures designed to promote racial and gender diversity in politics; and dismantle regulatory structures.

“It will create a notion of impunity, a notion that corruption can occur.”

“It will create a notion of impunity, a notion that corruption can occur,” said Hannah Maruci, a political scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, speaking of the potential passage of the legislative packages. “It will generate a deficit in representation, which is already low. And it will reinforce the idea that politics is a place only for certain groups.”

The three main proposals on the table — which would change how votes are cast, how they are counted, and the rules governing how campaigns are run and regulated — are being spearheaded by members of Congress who have voted in line with the Bolsonaro government at least 82 percent of the time since 2019.

Late Monday night, a proposal to change the way votes are counted for state and federal congressional elections, known as “distritão,” passed in committee, the first of many hurdles. The constitutional amendments need to pass multiple votes in both chambers of Congress and be signed into law by Bolsonaro before September to be enacted for elections next October.

The bills moved unusually quickly through committees, signaling a push to get the new laws into effect for next year’s elections. While it is uncertain if any of the proposals will pass in time, they serve as a window into the priorities of the Bolsonaro government and its allies in the Centrão, a broad coalition of political parties that serves the interests of the nation’s oligarchs.

Weakening Diversity, Strengthening Incumbents

As the law currently stands, Brazilians may vote for individual candidates or political parties, with the total number of votes for the party and its candidates determining the number of seats awarded to each party. As a result, a less popular candidate from a popular party can potentially win a seat over an opponent with more individual votes.

Under the new rule, Brazil would transition over two election cycles to a system in which only the individual tallies matter, making voting a much trickier proposition, considering that voters often have hundreds of candidates from dozens of parties to choose from. In 2018, for example, São Paulo had 1,686 candidates from 35 parties running for 70 congressional seats.

Critics say this change would weaken women’s representation as well as minority candidates and parties. The shift could serve the interests of wealthy and “celebrity” candidates, as well as criminal mafias, like those linked to Bolsonaro, which can use violence to intimidate entire neighborhoods to vote for specific candidates.

Maruci, the political scientist and co-founder of A Tenda das Candidatas, a group aimed at increasing female representation in politics, said the bill favors incumbents and represents “an elitist project aimed at maintaining exclusion.”

“It’s a project that strengthens the oligarchies,” said Vânia Aieta, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University and practicing electoral attorney. “It’s a real danger,” she told The Intercept. “If they approve the distritão, the political sharks would all be elected, and you would eliminate all of the opposition.”

Green Light for Electoral Corruption

Another proposal would fundamentally rewrite the nation’s election laws. The bill, with some 900 articles, would make some major changes, including a dramatic reduction in the role and the authority of the electoral justice system to regulate, investigate, and penalize political candidates and parties.

It would also grant parties more autonomy over how they spend funds and dramatically cut back reporting requirements. Illegal campaign financing and other campaign violations, which can currently result in a winning candidate having to forfeit their position, would be punishable, at most, by relatively small fines, except in cases involving violence.

While parties are legally required to distribute public campaign funds proportionally to candidates of all genders and races, the new bill creates a loophole: Women would be allowed to use their electoral funds on behalf of other candidates.

And decisions by the Superior Electoral Court would have to be issued more than a year before an election to take effect — and Congress, for the first time, would be permitted to invalidate these rulings.

The wide-ranging proposal would also “decriminalize” Election Day activities to sway votes and “hinder democratic control over the emergence of extremist, authoritarian or human rights violating groups,” according to Freio na Reforma, a coalition of dozens of predominantly centrist civil society and political organizations opposed to the bill.

Rep. Margarete Coelho, the main author of the bill and a leader of the Centrão-affiliated Progressistas party, provided a written statement that disagreed with many of the consensus characterizations by critics. In May, she told Brazilian news outlet Jota that the current electoral system is too “noisy” and requires a “simplification” to “reduce judicialization.”

Aieta, the law professor, who was consulted on the bill, said there are some improvements that would reduce “judicial warfare” in the electoral courts by losing candidates and end some rules that she believes to be overly onerous or outdated. However, she emphasized that the relaxed finance and reporting requirements for parties are “absurd.” She said, “Evidently, there was strong lobbying by the political parties, their leaders.”

The larger goal, according to Aieta, is for elected members of Congress of all political persuasions to rewrite the rules in a way that keeps themselves in power: “The number of representatives committed to the status quo is infinitely greater than those who are committed to change.” She noted that even some left-leaning representatives were joining the Centrão’s efforts to shore up their positions.

Bolsonaro Threatens Coup (Again)

In Brazil’s national political conversation, debate over these consequential proposals has been largely sidelined. Instead, the focus has mostly been on Bolsonaro’s push to move from an exclusively digital voting system to one that produces paper ballot receipts that can be used to audit the digital record. The president and his allies dramatically ramped up messaging on the issue after the April launch of a Senate inquiry into his catastrophic handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bolsonaro began casting doubt on the integrity of the country’s electoral system soon after his 2018 victory, an apparent pretext to halt or contest the 2022 elections and remain in power. He has made claims of electoral fraud without producing evidence, a strategy that clearly echoes former U.S. President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat.

“If there are no printed ballots, it is a sign that there will be no election,” said Bolsonaro in a live address broadcast on his Facebook page in May. He has doubled down on the threat, telling an audience of supporters in July that “either we have clean elections in Brazil or we don’t have elections.” Last month, the conservative Estadão newspaper reported that influential military figures allied with Bolsonaro have made similar statements.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, on a trip to Brazil last week, reportedly urged Bolsonaro to stop undermining elections.

The paper ballot proposal was voted down in committee last week, but the Bolsonaro-aligned leader of the lower house nonetheless put it to a full floor vote on Tuesday, in an apparent attempt to lay the issue to rest. The vote failed, as even Bolsonaro expected.

After the speaker refused to delay the vote in order to give Bolsonaro more time to whip up support, the navy announced a military parade in Brasília on Tuesday, the day of the vote. Forty vehicles, including tanks, participated in the show of force, which was attended by Bolsonaro, top ministers, the heads of the armed forces, and influential allies of the president.

The display was widely condemned by opponents. Sen. Omar Aziz, who is leading the Senate inquiry into Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic, opened the day’s session with a rebuke: “Every public figure, in addition to fulfilling his constitutional functions, should fear ridicule. But Bolsonaro doesn’t care for any of these limits, as is clear in today’s pathetic scene, which only shows the threat of a weakling who knows he has lost.”

Brazil has suffered nine coup d’états over the last two centuries, including the U.S.-backed 1964 military coup that led to a brutal 20-year military dictatorship. Only one military member has ever been held responsible for human rights violations during the period.

The post Bolsonaro Allies in Brazilian Congress Push Sweeping Electoral Changes to Keep Hold on Power appeared first on The Intercept.

“There is a direct relationship between denialism, corruption, and the way the pandemic has become the country’s greatest health tragedy and the greatest story of corruption,” Rep. Paulo Pimenta, an opposition politician, told The Intercept.

Two separate but intertwined cases with strong evidence of fraud have become the focus of a Senate investigation into the government’s mishandling of the pandemic. The cases implicate members of Bolsonaro’s administration, his key allies in Congress, and senior members of the military appointed to top roles in the Health Ministry. In both instances, Health Ministry officials attempted to buy vaccines through intermediaries rather than directly from producers, which are less likely to partake in brazenly crooked deals.

Bolsonaro reportedly failed to intervene when alerted to irregularities in the government’s negotiations to acquire 20 million doses of the Covaxin vaccine, produced by India’s Bharat Biotech, at above-market rates. In a sworn Senate testimony, the whistleblower claimed that the president said, “It’s another scam by this Ricardo Barros,” referring to an ally who is a leader in the lower house of Congress and a former health minister and who serves as a prominent member of a powerful and notoriously corrupt centrist bloc. Bolsonaro, who rose to prominence on an anti-corruption platform, has not refuted the accusations. What’s more, the president’s son, Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro, also has close ties to the owner of the intermediary firm at the center of the scandal, Precisa Medicamentos.

In the second case, the Health Ministry’s former head of logistics, Roberto Dias, allegedly requested a $1 kickback on each dose from a supplier, U.S.-based Davati Medical Supply, which claimed that it could provide 400 million AstraZeneca shots. Davati, it turned out, was not actually a representative of AstraZeneca and had no way of delivering on the deal, yet somehow was able to negotiate with top officials.

Meanwhile, revelations continue to trickle out of the Senate commission, which convened in late April and will resume hearings on August 3, after a two-week recess.

“Every day we are discovering a new element or fact,” said Sen. Randolfe Rodrigues, vice president of the commission. “We are also discovering other fraudulent contracts with suspected corruption.”

“Embodiment of Impunity”

As a presidential candidate in 2018, Bolsonaro ran against the large, powerful bloc of political parties representing the country’s oligarchs, known widely as the “Centrão.” He slammed them as corrupt and “the worst of Brazil.” At Bolsonaro’s campaign launch, a close adviser told the crowd that “the Centrão is the embodiment of impunity.”

Yet as evidence of impropriety mounts and public opinion tilts sharply against Bolsonaro, the president is deepening his alliance with the Centrão, handing over more power in an apparent strategy to secure some impunity of his own.

On Tuesday, Sen. Ciro Nogueira accepted Bolsonaro’s offer to become his chief of staff, a key Cabinet-level position reserved for trusted allies. Nogueira is a Centrão leader and has been directly implicated in coronavirus-related corruption; he is also under investigation in five other criminal cases. He was the president’s main defender in the Senate commission, where he will be replaced by Flavio Bolsonaro.

By handing over the keys to the presidential palace, Bolsonaro will appease the speaker of the lower House of Congress, Arthur Lira, who is from Nogueira’s party and is the only person in Brazil who can initiate, or block, impeachment proceedings over the tragic mishandling of the pandemic.

Pandemic as Opportunity

More than 550,000 Brazilians have died of Covid-19, the second-highest death toll in the world. Since last March, public health experts and political observers around the world gnashed their teeth as Bolsonaro, time and again, downplayed the seriousness of the disease and encouraged Brazilians to live their lives as usual, without masks. A comprehensive study by researchers at the University of São Paulo concluded that the president “intentionally” and systematically acted to spread the virus.

Tatiana Roque, coordinator of the Science and Culture Forum at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, told The Intercept that the Bolsonaro administration pursued an “anti-scientific, denialist, eugenicist, and individualistic” response to the pandemic due to deeply held ideological commitments. Every tool to effectively combat the pandemic requires “greater regulation and a greater presence of the state,” she said. These “collective measures,” according to Roque, “go against the founding ideology of this extreme right, which is its libertarianism.”

Pimenta, the member of Congress from former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s opposition Workers’ Party, said that corruption is at the heart of the pandemic response and that Bolsonaro is responsible. “Anyone who knows Bolsonaro, the Bolsonaro family, knows that no corruption scheme occurs within the government without the direct participation of the family,” Pimenta said. “He’s the head of the criminal scheme, him and his sons.”

According to Pimenta, the intentional spread of the virus was part of a strategy to facilitate bribes on contracts for vaccines and emergency medical supplies.

“It’s perverse, because you need the country to have many deaths to justify to the public opinion that you’re going to pay more than the market price, in theory, to prevent those deaths from continuing to occur, even though it was you who caused the deaths. It’s Kafkaesque,” said Pimenta. “The pandemic was a window of opportunity for them because the pandemic ended the need for bidding. What’s better for a guy who deals in corruption than being able to buy everything as an emergency purchase without bidding?”

Sen. Humberto Costa, also of the Workers’ Party and a member of the Senate commission, told The Intercept that ideology and the desire to not close down the economy motivated the pandemic response; the corruption was incidental. The administration “knew that there was no way to continue stalling the purchase of vaccines, but they saw that the amount of money being spent was very large, and then they went after some possibilities that could result in bribes,” said Costa.

“The pandemic was a window of opportunity for them because the pandemic ended the need for bidding.”

Rodrigues, vice president of the Senate commission, said the inquiry has implicated “the crème de la crème of Bolsonaro’s base” in corruption cases, including many people “with relationships with Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro.”

The investigation is also looking at more than $159 million in suspicious deals between the logistics firm VTCLOG and the Health Ministry beginning in 2016. The contracts began prior to the pandemic and the Bolsonaro administration but are still active and involve his key allies, including Nogueira, Lira, Flavio Bolsonaro, and Barros.

Flavio, who was charged last year over a suspected embezzlement scheme involving mafia figures, rankled even close supporters in March when he purchased a luxurious mansion in Brasíia worth over $1 million, a home that would be unattainable based on his official income.

Rodrigues said he expects to uncover more corruption before the inquiry is finished and that the investigation has already had a substantial impact on coronavirus policy. “The investigation changed Brazil’s agenda,” he said. “The country’s agenda is no longer dictated by Jair Bolsonaro’s nonsense.”

Vaccine Shortages

The result of the government’s failure to combat the pandemic is a story of shortages and despair. One in 3 Brazilian state capitals have suspended first-dose vaccinations due to supply shortages. With 18 percent of its population fully vaccinated, Brazil lags behind regional neighbors such as Uruguay and Chile — which have some of the highest rates in the world — as well as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Colombia. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, eligibility only extends to those age 34 and older, in addition to adults of any age with comorbidities. New infection rates remain high but are down from near-record numbers in June.

A recent poll suggested that only 5 percent of Brazilians do not intend to get vaccinated once they are eligible, despite a yearlong deluge of anti-vaccine messaging from Bolsonaro and his allies.

The Bolsonaro administration turned down, or simply ignored, at least 14 offers from vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, COVAX Facility, and the Butantan Institute, including offers with deep discounts — decisions that significantly slowed down Brazilian vaccination efforts.

Brazil has administered over 136 million vaccine doses so far, relying primarily on the U.K.’s AstraZeneca and China’s CoronaVac, both produced in partnership with Brazilian labs. Smaller quantities of the Pfizer and Janssen shots are also being administered. Russia canceled the first shipment of its Sputnik V vaccine, scheduled to arrive on Wednesday, after Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga said that there was “no need.”

It now seems unlikely that Brazilians will be able to get vaccinated with Covaxin either. The original contract was suspended last month, and on Tuesday, the Brazilian health regulator canceled clinical trials of the drug. Days earlier, Bharat Biotech terminated its relationship with Precisa after it determined that the company had provided the Brazilian government with fraudulent documents in the manufacturer’s name.

Meanwhile, the human cost of the pandemic continues to pile up. As of April, Covid-19 created over 130,000 orphans in Brazil. And with the economy lagging, 9 million more Brazilians joined the ranks of the malnourished and hungry during the pandemic.

The post “Worst of Brazil”: Covid-19 Vaccine Corruption Implicates Top Bolsonaro Allies appeared first on The Intercept.

Da Silva’s tragic misfortune is emblematic of multiple facets of Brazil’s descent into disarray. On a basic level, a common man working to pay his bills is permanently scarred by authoritarian state violence, carried out in an effort to stamp out left-wing resistance. Beneath the surface, a more ominous dynamic was at work: Gov. Paulo Câmara, a Bolsonaro critic and commander-in-chief of the state police, insists that neither he nor anybody from his office gave the order to attack the protestors. The president’s interests had apparently overridden the governor’s legal authority over the security forces. One columnist was prompted to ask: “Who commands the police?”

How far will Bolsonaro go to stay in power?

The power struggle and the consequences for people like da Silva raise another, larger question: How far will Bolsonaro go to stay in power?

Bolsonaro, who faces record disapproval, has ratcheted up his pressure on opponents in various ways, attempting to fortify himself ahead of presidential elections next October. He has worked to build a solid base among local police rank and file (although that support may be fading) and replaced wavering allies with loyal shock troops in key military, intelligence, and law enforcement positions. All the while, Bolsonaro has repeatedly signaled his desire to rewrite the rules to give himself more power, even if it requires a coup to do so.

Dictatorship-Era Law

In recent months, Bolsonaro has increasingly taken to the courts to stifle dissent among prominent adversaries. Critics of the president — including journalists, politicians, Indigenous leaders, YouTubers, professors, and activists — have been investigated under the dictatorship-era National Security Law, which is widely considered unconstitutional.

One such case involved leading Brazilian YouTuber Felipe Neto, an outspoken Bolsonaro critic who referred to the president as “genocidal” over his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Neto, who got his start making videos for young people, was also investigated for alleged “corruption of minors,” but the charges were dismissed by a judge last week. Neto said the case was an attempt to use the judiciary as an “instrument of persecution of the president’s opponents.”

The National Security Law was increasingly in the spotlight and at risk of being struck down by the Supreme Court — past due, critics said, for a relic of the dictatorship that ended in 1985. The president’s supporters in Congress, though, rushed to introduce legislation that repealed the law but maintained many of its provisions in a separate, new bill. The legislation passed the lower house of Congress last month.

Along with a host of other civil society groups, Abraji, the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism, said it strongly supports repealing the law and does “not support any bill currently being developed to replace it.” The group highlighted that the new bill, as written, could be used to “criminalize everyday behaviors” of journalists and give rise to the prosecution of whistleblowers.

Marcelo Semer, a law professor and member of the Association of Judges for Democracy, told The Intercept that the law is more likely to be used for state repression of dissidents than to protect Brazil’s fragile democracy against a coup. In a recent congressional hearing, he called the National Security Law “an obstacle to democracy” and argued that it would be much better to revoke it than replace it.

That analysis likely won’t resonate with Bolsonaro, who has never been particularly fond of democracy and only criticized the military dictatorship for not going far enough. In a 2016 interview, Bolsonaro said, “The mistake of the dictatorship was to torture and not kill.” His son, Rep. Eduardo Bolsonaro, and many supporters have repeatedly called for “a new AI-5,” referring to the notorious 1968 military decree that heavily curtailed political freedoms and institutionalized torture, inaugurating what became known as the “Years of Lead.”

War on the Press

“I’d like to punch you in the mouth, you bastard,” Bolsonaro told a reporter last year. It was just one of hundreds of threats that the president had lobbed at the media since taking office in 2019. According to the National Federation of Journalists, physical and verbal attacks on the media have reached all-time highs under this presidency, growing rapidly year over year.

The administration has largely closed its doors to news media that publish anything critical, making it harder to verify even basic facts. It also greatly increased advertising spending but radically shifted its tens of millions of dollars in ad buys to favor politically aligned outlets. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s supporters have repeatedly accosted journalists in the streets, preventing them from doing their job.

Bolsonaro, who once told journalists that they are “an endangered species,” is running nothing short of a campaign to destroy the media. Patricia Campos Mello, a veteran journalist who recently won judgments against the president and his son Eduardo for offensive comments, has drawn comparisons between Bolsonaro’s playbook and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s successful campaign against the press. Orbán was able to co-opt major outlets, economically squeeze resistors, delegitimize independent journalists as “enemies,” and use state powers to limit press freedom. Bolsonaro has made inroads in all of these areas.

The developments are concerning, but Celso Rocha de Barros, a political columnist for the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, said the recent cases brought against critics might be a sign of weakness rather than strength. “They see that this is the worst situation they’ve been in yet,” said Barros, citing low approval numbers, a sagging economy, and the return of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the political scene.

Late last month, Senate police launched an investigation into Barros after he criticized Bolsonaro allies for trying to obstruct a Senate inquiry into the government’s miserable handling of the pandemic. “Their goal is clearly to intimidate, to limit criticism against them,” Barros said. “I personally will not be intimidated.”

Brazilian January 6?

Much could change before the election. Congress has clearly shown no interest in impeaching the president, which gives Bolsonaro 16 months — an eternity in fast-paced Brazilian politics — to pray for an economic recovery and successful vaccination campaign that would win voters’ confidence.

He likely won’t be relying on improved conditions alone. Bolsonaro could attempt to use partisan allies in the executive branch, media, judiciary, and law enforcement to manipulate the election in his favor. Current polling shows that Lula would win handily, but Bolsonaro, like former U.S. President Donald Trump, has clearly signaled that he does not intend to accept a loss at the polls.

Bolsonaro has been on a campaign to delegitimize Brazil’s electronic voting system, saying he will only accept the results of an election with paper ballots. “This is just a smokescreen that creates the environment for them to discredit the results of the polls,” said João Amoedo, an opposition politician, last month.

“There’s a coup practically scheduled for next year if they lose the election.”

Last week, former President Michel Temer expressed concern that Bolsonaro would attempt a coup if he lost. Temer, a center-right politician, argued that supporters of Brazilian democracy needed to do more to improve relations with the military, which is firmly allied with Bolsonaro, to prevent such an eventuality.

“There’s a coup practically scheduled for next year if they lose the election,” said Barros, the political columnist, though he is doubtful Bolsonaro can pull it off.

Eduardo Bolsonaro, meanwhile, appears to have thought through coup strategies. The younger Bolsonaro was on hand in Washington, D.C., and met with members of the Trump family and inner circle before, during, and after the Capitol insurrection on January 6.

In an interview with the Estadão newspaper in January, Eduardo Bolsonaro suggested the problem was not that the far-right insurrection took place but that it was poorly executed. “It was a disorganized movement. It was unfortunate. Nobody wanted this to happen,” he said. “If it were organized, they would have taken over the Capitol and made demands that the invading group established in advance. They would have minimal military power to not kill anyone, kill all the police inside or the members of Congress that they hate so much. When the right becomes 10 percent of the left, we are going to have civil war in all western countries.”

The post Bolsonaro Ramps Up Crackdown on Dissent With Tough Brazil Election Looming appeared first on The Intercept.

“It is imperative that Congress receive full and accurate answers regarding our government’s actions — particularly when those actions may have long-lasting effects beyond our shores,” said Rep. Susan Wild, D-Penn., in a statement to The Intercept.

“It is imperative that Congress receive full and accurate answers regarding our government’s actions — particularly when those actions may have long-lasting effects beyond our shores.”

Car Wash targeted a sprawling network of political corruption centered around the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras. U.S. and Brazilian prosecutors’ aggressive tactics greatly weakened Brazil’s once-powerful civil construction and petroleum sectors and led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, clearing the way for far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro to win the presidency in 2018.

“Whether or not our DOJ was responsible for the wrongful imprisonment of President Silva and paved the way for Bolsonaro, a COVID-denying, climate change-denying, far-right nationalist, to take the presidency must be investigated to the fullest extent and those responsible held accountable,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., one of the congressional letter’s signatories, told The Intercept.

Wild, the Pennsylvania Democrat, said, “I have long been concerned by Lava Jato” — Car Wash in Portuguese — “and its consequences for Brazilian democracy — particularly what appears to have been a deeply flawed and politicized effort to imprison former President Lula and to keep him off the ballot in the 2018 presidential election. If the Department of Justice played any role in the erosion of Brazilian democracy, we must take action and ensure accountability so that it never happens again.”

After Bolsonaro’s victory, he quickly appointed Sergio Moro, the judge who convicted Lula of corruption, to be his justice minister, outraging opponents who viewed the move as proof of Moro’s — and Operation Car Wash’s — partisan leanings. In 2019, The Intercept began publishing an investigative series based on damning private chat records between Moro and Car Wash prosecutors, which showed collusion, political bias, and other improprieties.

In March, citing The Intercept’s reporting, the Brazilian Supreme Court vacated the convictions against Lula, who had earlier been released, and restored his right to run for office. The court also ruled later in the month that Moro was biased, dealing a mortal blow to the hugely influential prosecution that evolved into a powerful political movement.

Moro broke with Bolsonaro in 2020 and resigned from office. He now works as a lawyer and the managing partner at a consulting firm that represents companies he previously convicted as the Car Wash judge. Lula is again the frontrunner in next year’s presidential election. Reporting from The Intercept and Brazilian news outlet Agência Pública also revealed that the FBI requested case files on the investigation into Lula before the case went public and the Brazilians quietly sent the information through nonofficial channels.

The letter to Garland — led by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., and signed by prominent progressives like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. — cites a similar letter that Johnson and colleagues sent to then-Attorney General William Barr on August 20, 2019, months after The Intercept’s initial reporting on Moro and the Car Wash prosecutors. “Regrettably, we did not receive a substantive response from Attorney General Barr to the questions we raised at the time,” the new letter reads. (The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The case will be a test of Garland’s stated commitment to the principles of democracy and rule of law. The original Car Wash-Department of Justice collaboration occurred largely during the Obama administration, under Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and was promoted by the Justice Department as a model partnership. A top department official told an audience in 2017, “It is hard to imagine a better cooperative relationship in recent history than that of the United States Department of Justice and the Brazilian prosecutors.”

In their letter, the members of Congress cite reporting from The Intercept in collaboration with Brazilian news outlet Agência Pública last March, which revealed that exchanges between the Department of Justice and Brazilian prosecutors may not have followed proper protocols.

In a 2015 incident, at least 17 U.S. law enforcement officials traveled to the Car Wash task force headquarters in Curitiba, Brazil, for a series of meetings about the investigation, while undertaking efforts to hide the visit from the Brazilian government. Under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty that regulates legal collaboration between the two countries, the host government must formally approve law enforcement activity by foreign agents in their country.

In a chat on the messaging app Telegram, Car Wash task force coordinator Deltan Dallagnol ordered a press aide to keep the meetings under wraps, saying the “Americans don’t want us to divulge things.” Details of the meetings, however, eventually leaked to the press. The Brazilian Justice Ministry immediately demanded details about the visit, but Dallagnol negotiated with colleagues to limit the amount of information that would be handed over, even attempting to hide the names of the U.S. officials.

After this was revealed by The Intercept and Agência Pública, 77 members of Brazil’s Congress sent a letter to their U.S. counterparts, requesting that the Americans “adopt the appropriate legislative measures” and “hold those responsible agents and officials accountable.”

Brazilian Rep. Glauber Braga, who organized the Brazilian congressional letter, considers the U.S. role in Operation Car Wash to be an “illegal and criminal interference.” “We cannot accept foreign interference disguised as ‘cooperation’ that aims to facilitate the implementation of an economic program to dismantle the Brazilian economy and harm democratic freedoms within the country,” Braga told The Intercept.

The chat records published by The Intercept and Agência Pública also show how Dallagnol cavalierly worked to bend the rules to benefit U.S. prosecutors, without approval from his superiors, who worried that he was violating the law to do so. The Brazilian prosecutor was eager to keep the Americans happy in order to negotiate a larger share of the billions in dollars of settlement payments being negotiated by the U.S. Department of Justice, Petrobras, and associated contractors. In a 2016 chat, Brazilian prosecutors said that the Department of Justice had “total knowledge” of the Brazilian investigation into the Odebrecht construction firm, which eventually pleaded guilty to bribery charges in the U.S. and agreed to pay a record $3.5 billion penalty and later filed for bankruptcy.

Dallagnol and other prosecutors attempted to maintain control of Brazil’s share of those funds and use them to create an independent “anti-corruption” foundation, but their plan was shot down by the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2019.

Monday’s letter stated that House Democrats “are particularly concerned that the income produced from the enforcement of important U.S. legislation dedicated to fighting corruption, could have ended up going to ends not entirely consistent with democracy, rule of law, equal justice under the law, and due process — not to mention Brazilian legal and constitutional requirements.”

The post House Democrats Want Answers About U.S. Role in Disgraced Brazil Corruption Probe appeared first on The Intercept.

However, he also saw a fantastic opportunity in the pandemic that was just taking hold in Brazil. “We have the possibility at this moment that the press attention is exclusively focused almost exclusively on Covid,” he told his colleagues and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. It was time, he said, to “let the cattle loose and change all the rules and simplify the regulations.”

Over the last year, that is exactly what the Bolsonaro administration has done: kneecapped regulatory bodies, signed wide-ranging executive decrees, drafted new laws, and encouraged illegal miners, ranchers, and loggers to be even bolder in their race to strip the Amazon of its resources. These policies have been catastrophic for the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Brazilians who live on federally protected lands that are increasingly under attack by bands of heavily armed criminals with ties to powerful elites. Many scientists believe that the Amazon is dangerously close to reaching a level of deforestation that would provoke a rapid and irreversible collapse of the region’s complex ecosystem, with wide-ranging implications for the continent and the globe.

But the effort to push back against Bolsonaro’s environmental policies has just gotten an unexpected boost from Brazil’s Supreme Court. Last week, the Supreme Court granted search warrants for Salles’ homes and financial records and ordered that the country’s top environmental regulator, Eduardo Bim, be temporarily removed from his position while the investigation is underway. Salles reportedly did not turn over his cellphone to the police and began using a new phone and number the day the investigation was announced, which could be considered obstruction of justice. Bim has temporarily stepped down.

The Supreme Court decision highlighted $2.6 million in suspicious transactions by a law firm co-owned by Salles and his mother. The Federal Police are investigating Salles and 10 officials under his command for alleged participation in a criminal logging syndicate, corruption, money laundering, and interfering in a police operation that resulted in the largest seizure of illegal timber in Brazilian history, among other crimes. The timber, enough to fill 6,243 trucks, was destined for the U.S. and Europe.

Confiscation in U.S. Starts Probe

The investigation began after the U.S. Embassy informed the Brazilian government of a seizure of three containers of timber in Savannah, Georgia, believed to be of illicit origin due to lack of proper documentation. Bim tried and failed to convince the U.S. authorities to clear the containers, then changed the regulations to no longer require the missing documents. According to Brazilian news reports, the U.S. notified the Federal Police of concerns about “possible inappropriate actions or corrupt behavior” by representatives of the importing company “and/or public officials” responsible for overseeing the extraction and export of wood products from the Amazon region.

The director-general of the Federal Police and the public prosecutor, both staunch Bolsonaro allies, were reportedly not informed of the operation against Salles, which was approved by a sole Supreme Court minister. Bolsonaro has controversially replaced career bureaucrats with ardent loyalists, including much of the Federal Police leadership and the leader of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency. However, public servants are difficult to fire, and independent voices still remain within the ranks, like those responsible for the Salles investigation.

With Brazil’s Congress and most enforcement agencies under Bolsonaro’s thumb, the Supreme Court has been forced to fill in the gap and become the main check against the president’s power and a primary target of his anger.

Bolsonaro’s mission to bulldoze environmental protections continues to advance on multiple fronts, despite the investigation into Salles and his associates.

Earlier this month, the lower house of Congress, the majority of which is allied with Bolsonaro, passed the most ambitious and potentially calamitous legislation yet for the Amazon. The bill would do away with environmental licensing for many of the most harmful economic activities and remove the responsibility of banks and lenders that finance these activities.

Put forward by the powerful agribusiness caucus, the bill, which still needs to pass the Senate, would end the need for environmental licensing or allow “self-licensing” for many types of farming and infrastructure projects, as well as improvements to existing installations. It would also make it easier to greenlight projects on the 41 percent of Indigenous lands that are not yet fully recognized by the government and removes the right of Indigenous communities to veto proposed projects on their own land.

“The environmental license is the main tool that exists in the country for preventing pollution and degradation,” according to Suely Araújo, a senior specialist at the Climate Observatory, a nongovernmental organization, and former president of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, in an interview with The Intercept. Araújo says the bill is unconstitutional and would create “chaos” and “unprecedented legal uncertainty.” She is also concerned about other proposed legislation that is designed to loosen restrictions on pesticides, legalize mining on Indigenous reserves, and facilitate large-scale land grabbing.

Under Salles, the Brazilian government made over 1,000 regulatory changes since 2019 related to the environment without having to go through Congress, according to Política por Inteiro, a watchdog project. These changes included gutting regulatory budgets, reducing the voice of civil society on oversight boards, increasing tolerance for pollution and toxic waste, creating a larger role for the military, waiving unpaid fines, facilitating land grabbing and commodity exports, and blocking new regulations recommended by experts, according to a report by Climate Observatory.

Last December, Brazil did not increase its climate crisis goals under the United Nations Paris Agreement, as many other countries did, and actually removed a previous pledge to reduce deforestation, as well as any use of the word. Salles, a climate crisis denier, repeated a demand from the previous year that Brazil must receive $10 billion in foreign aid per year if it is to be expected to meet its goals. The position, coming from a government that has shown no interest in protecting the environment, was derided by 56 climate organizations as attempted “blackmail,” labeling the proposal “insufficient and immoral.”

Amazon Deforestation Spreads

The on-the-ground results of Salles’ policies have been predictable: Deforestation has risen year over year, and organized crime is emboldened. Last year, an area the size of Jamaica was deforested, the worst tally since 2008. Worse yet, much of the deforestation is occurring in new, more remote areas where land grabbers previously did not operate, including in constitutionally protected Indigenous reserves.

In recent weeks, wildcat miners opened fire three times on a village in the Yanomami Indigenous reserve, which borders Venezuela and sits on a massive gold deposit, in the Amazonian state of Roraima. On the third occasion, on May 11, around 20 miners were repelled without gunfire by six Federal Police officers in the village but returned an hour later to attack again, this time using heavy weaponry, said Dario Kopenawa Yanomami, vice president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, in an interview with The Intercept. “Organized crime gangs are operating inside the Yanomami territory,” he said.

It is estimated that around 20,000 wildcat miners are operating illegally within the Yanomami territory, which is larger than Indiana and home to around 27,000 people. Miners are now operating less than 10 miles away from uncontacted tribes on the territory. “The Brazilian government is trying to kill our isolated Indians through invasion,” Kopenawa said. A Supreme Court minister ordered the Bolsonaro administration, this week, to take immediate measures to protect indigenous communities.

Bolsonaro is also under enormous international pressure to stop destroying the Amazon. A $19 trillion trade deal between the European Union and the Mercosur bloc — comprised of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay — is being held up over environmental concerns, mostly regarding Brazil. Dozens of international corporations have boycotted or threatened to boycott Brazilian goods over environmental policies since the massive forest fires of 2019. Last year, Brazil sold more than $100 billion in agricultural goods and livestock abroad, representing nearly half of all exports. Mining exports totaled $37 billion.

Climate has now become a key issue in bilateral relations with the U.S. under the Biden administration. During a presidential debate last September, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden angered Bolsonaro when he warned, “Stop tearing down the forest, and if you don’t, you are going to have significant economic consequences.” Brazilian business leaders, worried about sanctions and boycotts, have previously urged Bolsonaro to fire Salles and moderate his rhetoric, but the president resisted. That was before the investigation was announced. While the investigation will increase the pressure on Bolsonaro, so far he has reaffirmed his support for Salles, publicly calling him “an excellent minister.”

Marina Silva, a former environment minister who successfully reduced deforestation and is now a leading environmentalist, told The Intercept that “this is a highly embarrassing, terrible situation” and that regardless of the results of the investigation, Salles has been criminally negligent throughout his tenure and must be removed.

Indigenous leaders and environmentalists told The Intercept that the best weapon left to defend the Amazon is international action in the form of sanctions, boycotts, and political pressure. Silva, the former minister, said companies that boycott dirty Brazilian goods “are correct. You have to close the door on these products in your countries.”

Boycotts of industries that destroy the Amazon while creating huge profits for owners, who often rely on slave labor and criminality, would have serious short-term negative impacts on the Brazilian economy, which is reliant on commodity exports. But in the long term, sanctions would help push the government and affected companies to adopt more sustainable practices and new activities that could create better jobs and prevent catastrophic environmental collapse.

“We want international authorities to pressure the Brazilian government,” says Kopenawa, the Indigenous leader. “Do not buy the wood, oil, gold, and cattle that come from Indigenous lands. They are all the blood of the Indigenous people.”

The post Bolsonaro’s Environment Minister Bulldozed the Amazon. Now He’s Under Investigation for Corruption. appeared first on The Intercept.

Fogo Cruzado, a research institute that tracks armed violence in Rio de Janeiro, reported that 38 people have been killed in Jacarezinho during police raids since July 2016, constituting 83 percent of all gun homicides in the area. Last year, police in the state of Rio killed 1,239 people, an average of three per day, according to official data. Nearly 80 percent of Brazilians killed by Rio’s police are Black and brown, despite representing only about half of the population.

“Yesterday the Civil Police sent a message: The law doesn’t apply to them.”

The raid flouted a Supreme Court ruling last June ordering that police limit violent operations during the coronavirus pandemic, on account of the deaths of many innocent bystanders caught in crossfires. Among the victims Thursday were passengers in a public transit railcar passing nearby that was struck by stray bullets. “Yesterday the Civil Police sent a message: The law doesn’t apply to them,” said Maria Isabel Couto, a director at Fogo Cruzado. (My partner, Cecília Olliveira, is the founder of Fogo Cruzado, and I have done work for the organization.)

Witnesses told The Intercept that at least some of the deaths were the result of police “executions” of unarmed individuals. A police representative told the media on Thursday that one police officer had been killed and the other 24 dead were suspected drug traffickers. “To do an operation like this, there is a lot of planning, and we follow many protocols,” said Ronaldo Oliveira, the police chief responsible for the operation. “We follow certain techniques and police tactics to try hard to avoid confrontations and achieve our objectives. But that is not always the final result.”

On Friday afternoon, Cecília Olliveira reported for El País that, of the 21 suspects targeted by the raid, only three were arrested and three more were killed. The police have not revealed if any of the 13 identified victims who were not targets of the raid had criminal records.

In August 2017, The Intercept covered an intense seven-day police operation in Jacarezinho in response to the death of a police officer. At least five people were killed. Police opened fire from helicopters flying overhead and used snipers.

A similar dynamic may have played out this week, according to Pablo Nunes, a coordinator at Rio’s Center for Studies in Public Security and Citizenship. The police “made it very clear that this was a revenge operation. The 27 deaths occurred after the police officer was shot. This is what the police do, and it’s well documented,” said Nunes on Friday evening, adding that the raid was “repugnant” and “criminal.”

“Since at least 2018, we are living in a political climate of acceptance and even incentivization of this type of behavior,” he said. The election of President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies at the state and local levels, Nunes added, has promoted “a culture of impunity” for police violence.

Video translated by Elias Bresnick.

Assista ao vídeo do The Intercept Brasil aqui, em português.

The post Video: Deadliest Police Raid in Rio de Janeiro History Kills at Least 28 appeared first on The Intercept.

So far, Bolsonaro has proven adept at coopting public institutions, and avoiding accountability, through threats, promises, backroom negotiations, or placing loyalists into official positions. But when Brazil’s Senate launched a new inquiry into Bolsonaro’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the president’s allies were unable to block it. The panel convened for the first time on Tuesday, and members expect the investigation to produce impeachable evidence of his malfeasance.

“It is a true health, economic, and political tragedy, and the main responsibility lies with the president.”

The commission appears ready for a serious probe into the coronavirus response in Brazil. “It is a true health, economic, and political tragedy, and the main responsibility lies with the president,” said Sen. Humberto Costa, an opposition member of the commission. Costa, who is also a former health minister, told The Intercept that he believes there is enough evidence to conclude that Bolsonaro committed “crimes against humanity,” a label that other analysts have also used.

With October 2022’s presidential elections already looming, things could get worse for a man who has now spent years as an indomitable force in Brazilian politics. Bolsonaro never had to go head-to-head with Brazil’s most popular politician, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was barred from running in 2018 but is once again eligible and is gaining momentum.

As Brazil moves closer to election season, anything is possible. The president’s future will depend on his ability to maintain his tenuous alliances and the appearance of electability. He may finally be held accountable, either in Congress or at the polls, for his dismal handling of the country’s response to Covid-19 — which as of Thursday had killed over 400,000 Brazilians.

Fair-Weather Oligarchs

Every Brazilian president since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, regardless of ideology, has relied on the support of the “Centrão” parties in Congress. Literally, the word means “the big center,” but it more accurately describes a loose political bloc that represents the interests of Brazil’s oligarchs. The Centrão plays kingmaker and king-slayer alike; the parties’ support provides the votes necessary for passing legislation and has also been at the center of every impeachment in Brazil’s modern history. Winning over the bloc means delivering on pork-barrel spending, doling out influential political appointments, and, above all else, protecting the oligarchs’ economic interests.

Bolsonaro, who came to power on an anti-corruption platform, railed against the Centrão’s influence and promised not to play its game. But when the coalition of far-right extremists that rode his populist coattails into power collapsed due to infighting, Bolsonaro was forced into bed with the Centrão.

Ensuring the bloc’s support in recent legislative leadership elections came at a huge cost: billions of dollars in pork-barrel amendments to the budget that forced considerable cuts to development, health, and education spending. Shifting the money left little reserves for dealing with pressing needs, unforeseen circumstances, and future crises. The arrangement, though, could bring a big payoff for Bolsonaro, putting members of Congress in his corner to block or subvert potential impeachment proceedings or other inquiries. Bolsonaro’s congressional support and loyalist appointees have already thwarted progress on the multiple corruption scandals involving the president and his family.

So far, the Centrão’s support has also meant that Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic hasn’t faced a real challenge in Congress. But with scandals mounting, that could change. The bloc’s loyalty can be fickle, and new, constitutionally mandated spending limits mean that Bolsonaro’s options to purchase its fealty will be extremely constrained this year. And if Bolsonaro’s political prospects become too dim ahead of the 2022 elections, no price will be enough, and the Centrão will abandon him in search of the next winning ticket. Some of loose bloc’s constituent political parties already have.

Congressional Investigation

Congressional leadership allied with Bolsonaro blocked congressional hearings into the government’s handling of the pandemic for over a year, ignoring overwhelming evidence of its catastrophic consequences. Despite having enough signatures, the Senate commission that began on Tuesday only moved forward after a decision by the Supreme Court forced the issue. Bolsonaro was reportedly furious at the decision and openly lashed out against the justice responsible for ruling.

The Brazilian media has already uncovered a slew of scandals related to the government’s handling of the pandemic, which will provide the panel with much to look into. Additional investigative powers promise to provide even more public evidence of Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the crisis. A detailed study of the government’s Covid-19 response by the University of São Paulo and the human rights group Conectas found that the Bolsonaro administration implemented an “institutional strategy to propagate the virus” — something the authors said was “intentional.”

Many influential voices, including Supreme Court Minister Gilmar Mendes, have referred to the government’s actions as “genocide” since early in the crisis. This month, the Brazilian Bar Association argued that Bolsonaro is committing “crimes against humanity.” A similar case was submitted to the International Criminal Court last July by a coalition of groups representing over 1 million medical professionals. The Senate panel will review the evidence that led experts to draw these conclusions and has subpoena power to call witnesses and uncover official documents.

“The government decided that the best way to overcome the pandemic was to allow as many people as possible to be contaminated, without considering the damage this would cause.”

Bolsonaro has done just about everything in his power to help the coronavirus kill as many Brazilians as possible. As president, he has forcefully discouraged mask use; rejected offers from vaccine manufacturers; fought against lockdowns; held back federal funds to fight the virus; actively promoted ineffective treatments with dangerous side effects; and slashed funding for science and health. When backed into a corner, he has repeatedly suggested that he could use the military to impose martial law — or even undertake a coup d’ètat if pushed too far.

“The commission’s role is to illuminate all dark areas in the fight against the pandemic,” said Sen. Renan Calheiros on Tuesday, after being voted in as the commission’s rapporteur. The specter of the commission, Calheiros said, “has already accelerated a series of administrative measures in the last few days that had been frozen.”

Brazil, which is lagging behind in vaccinations, has suffered over 400,000 coronavirus-related deaths, one of the highest tolls in the world, and has become an international pariah, as well as a prime breeding ground for new variants of the disease. The collapse of health care systems and overflowing cemeteries have made global headlines and spread the devastation across South America. Disentangling the whos, whats, and whys will be no easy task, especially as the president’s allies will work to stymie the investigation at every turn.

Of particular interest will be revealing why Brazil ignored or rejected initial offers to procure millions of doses of vaccines on at least 11 separate occasions, as well as how much of Brazil’s failure to combat the disease has been due to deliberate policy or administrative incompetence and ideological delusion.

Costa, the senator, believes that Bolsonaro deliberately acted to spread the virus. “The government decided that the best way to overcome the pandemic was to allow as many people as possible to be contaminated and thereby generate what is called ‘natural immunity from infection,’ without considering the damage this would cause,” Costa said. He also attributed some decisions to “the crude, intellectually limited vision of Bolsonaro and his government” mixed with far-right ideological beliefs. Costa believes that the panel will conclude that impeachable offenses were committed by Bolsonaro but is skeptical that it will result in impeachment. “With the support of the Centrão that he has today, he has the numbers to block impeachment.”

Poverty and Hunger

Since the early days of the pandemic, Bolsonaro publicly justified his rejection of lockdowns and other protective measures against Covid-19 by citing the importance of keeping the economy moving. He resisted direct cash assistance payments to keep government spending down and encouraged the nation to live their lives as usual. The president himself made regular maskless appearances at supermarkets and public gatherings to set an example.

While other world leaders who took similarly cavalier approaches simultaneously pursued vaccines and pivoted when global evidence proved that safety versus economy was a false dichotomy, Bolsonaro has failed to adapt to the facts.

Unsurprisingly, the Brazilian economy faltered. The official unemployment rate is now a record 14.2 percent and in reality is likely much higher. The Brazilian real was the world’s third-worst performing currency last year, as foreign investment fled the country and industries ground to a halt. New data suggests that 11 million Brazilians have crossed the line into extreme poverty since the pandemic began, a 45 percent increase, while the nation simultaneously minted 10 new billionaires. In an effort to hide the true extent of the economic carnage, the government recently cut 98 percent of the funding for the national census scheduled for this year, which could be cancelled as a result.

Last month, over 1,500 business leaders and economists signed an open letter to Bolsonaro imploring him to take effective measures to contain the coronavirus, including social spending, more than a year after the pandemic began. The letter, though, does not directly criticize Bolsonaro: As Alexander Busch noted in a column in Deutsche Welle Brasil, 40 percent of the economy depends on public spending, and business leaders are generally hesitant to publicly cross swords with the president holding the purse strings.

Meanwhile, many of Brazil’s most influential captains of industry still see opportunity in the current crisis and are eager to lend Bolsonaro their public support. Last month, top figures from Brazil’s banking businesses and an influential industry association applauded Bolsonaro and top officials as they sipped Dom Pérignon together at a private dinner. The business leaders promised to continue to support the embattled president if he would push forward with more promised neoliberal economic reforms under Economy Minister Paulo Guedes, a former bank executive and a past adviser to Chilean right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Despite their ideological affinity for Bolsonaro, these titans of industry experienced the nation’s greatest years of economic growth during the Lula presidency, which pursued a more inclusive economic path to growth. Lula is actively pursuing business leaders, who are likely growing nostalgic for the golden years, as are average citizens. Bolsonaro has seen majority disapproval in multiple public opinion polls for the first time in his presidency. Lula, by comparison, is again Brazil’s most popular presidential hopeful.

If Brazil’s institutions fail to extract any form of accountability from Bolsonaro, it will likely be up to Lula to save the nation from Bolsonaro through the ballot box. The former president was the frontrunner in the 2018 election but made ineligible by corruption convictions that were recently annulled by the Supreme Court, restoring his political rights. In recent weeks, Lula has been making his case for a third presidential term by promising a radically different vision on the economy and Covid-19 and by promising a return to reason and normalcy to a nation that is tired and beaten down by more than two years of Bolsonaro.

The post Brazil Seeks to Hold Bolsonaro Accountable for More Than 400,000 Covid-19 Deaths appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday — the same day Brazil saw a record 4,211 coronavirus deaths — the lower house of Congress passed a bill that would allow corporations to directly purchase vaccine doses from international suppliers and give them to employees, even before priority groups like the elderly and medical workers are fully vaccinated. “We are at war,” the leader of the chamber, Arthur Lira, argued, “and in war, anything goes to save lives.”

The bill was the latest in a series of efforts to chip away at the primacy of Brazil’s public system for distributing vaccines. The Brazilian public system is widely considered to be one of the most effective vaccine programs in the world, but failed to rise to the occasion under Bolsonaro’s leadership.

“Brazil’s vaccination campaigns are world renowned,” said Mellanie Fontes-Dutra, a biomedical scientist and researcher at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul who also works with the Covid-19 Analyst Network. “In this moment of crisis, we need ample, free, and universal access to Covid-19 vaccines.”

While private buyers will have a difficult time finding vaccine suppliers, corporations are setting themselves up to skip the line once doses do become available. Fontes-Dutra said the criteria for vaccination should be determined by public health authorities “and not by monetary power.”

The collapse of the public health system and the worsening crisis have shaken up Brazilian politics.

“In this moment of crisis, we need ample, free, and universal access to Covid-19 vaccines.”

In March, 66,868 Brazilians died from Covid-19, more than doubling the previous record. Now nearly 1 in every 3 deaths from the coronavirus worldwide occurs in Brazil. Intensive care unit occupancy rates are above 80 percent in almost every state, with the majority above 90 percent, and supplies of oxygen and intubation kits are critically low in many parts of the country. The Fiocruz public health institute has called the situation the “greatest sanitary and hospital collapse in the history of Brazil.”

For more than a year, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the risk of the virus, resisted proven public health measures, promoted disproven treatments, and actively sabotaged Brazil’s vaccination program.

The dire situation, though, has softened Bolsonaro’s strident rhetoric. He has even been forced to temper his public aversion to vaccines as public pressure has mounted and death tolls have spiraled out of control. Now Bolsonaro and his allies are begrudgingly backing vaccines — but with a rollback of the public system that allows corporations to address their own interests rather than wider societal needs. A pair of the president’s billionaire backers had supported Lira’s push for a private vaccination bill behind the scenes.

Bolsonaro’s early missteps, however, are still hanging over the crisis. “The real tragedy is that Brazil is among the few vaccine-manufacturing countries in the world blessed with world-class vaccine research and production facilities,” said Achal Prabhala of accessibsa, who works on increasing access to medicines and previously advised the Brazilian government. “If there had been a coordinated federal strategy early on to support the local production of vaccines, Brazil would have been in a very different situation today.”

Private Vaccinations

With the crisis worsening and hopes for a rapid and effective public campaign dwindling, the private vaccinations were initially justified in two ways: First, companies would be paying for the doses themselves, alleviating the cost on the public system. Plus, prescribed amounts of their private purchases would be put into the public system.

A private vaccination bill similar to the one pushed by Lira was already signed into law two weeks ago, but it included restrictions intended to shore up the lagging supply of vaccines going to the public health system. In the initial phases of private vaccine purchase, companies would need to donate their entire supply to the government’s vaccination drive; once vaccine levels rose, the firms would donate half their vaccine purchases to the public system.

The Lira-backed bill would let companies skip the requirement to donate their full purchases during the priority vaccination stage, when groups like the elderly and medical workers are supposed to be the focus. Instead, the companies are required to donate half their supply, but can also immediately begin vaccinating employees.

Lira and his allies also sought to use public means to defray the costs of vaccines for private companies. The initial draft bill provided a full tax write-off for the costs of vaccination, but the provision was quickly removed after objections from left and center-left opposition, who characterized the proposal as the public footing the bill for VIP vaccinations.

“Vaccines should be a public good. Opening up the possibility of private sector purchases may be another aggravating factor for inequalities in the country,” said Alessandro Molon, leader of the opposition in the lower house of Congress. “No country in the world has allowed this. Why should Brazil do this?”

Congress isn’t the only public institution seeking to make it easier for the wealthy and well-connected to skirt the public vaccination backlogs. Judges have allowed unions and large corporations, including an oil refinery, to import and administer thousands of vaccine doses, exempting them from the requirement to donate any of their supply. Some of the decisions have been overturned by higher courts, but others are standing. In a ruling last Thursday, federal Judge Ronaldo Valcir Spanholo argued that the donation requirement was an unconstitutional hindrance to the “complex (and already exaggeratedly slow!) immunization process.”

Brazilian corporations may still face one major hurdle, though: supply. Major Western vaccine producers have said that they do not intend to sell to private buyers while governments face major shortages.

Bolsonaro Washes His Hands

As part of his reversal on vaccines, Bolsonaro has supported Brazilian corporations’ push to buy doses directly. The move suits his interests: first, to wash his hands of responsibility for the colossal public health failure and second, to keep in line with the government’s stated mission to gut state organs and “privatize everything.”

Bolsonaro dragged his feet in support for any kind of vaccination drive. In an interview with Veja magazine, Carlos Murillo, country manager for Pfizer Brazil, revealed that last August, the Brazilian government ignored Pfizer’s offer to provide 70 million doses of their vaccine, millions of which would have already been delivered by now. Bolsonaro’s government eventually signed a deal with Pfizer for 100 million doses in March, but under a much later timeline, and agreed to purchase 38 million more from Janssen; 20 million doses of Covaxin, from India; and 10 million of Russia’s Sputnik V.

Since January, Brazil has been administering the CoronaVac vaccine, developed by China’s SinoVac Biotech in partnership with São Paulo’s Butantan Institute, and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, but supply and logistical shortfalls have forced the Health Ministry to repeatedly reduce distribution projections.

Nearly 12 percent of Brazilian adults have received at least one dose so far. A study by the Federal University of Juiz de Fora concluded that Brazil needed to administer 2 million vaccine doses a day, more than double the current rate, to bring the pandemic under control within a year. At current rates, vaccinating 70 percent of the population, which is required to reach herd immunity, may not occur until the end of 2022. The United States, by comparison, is projected to reach this milestone by mid-June of this year.

Lula Leads

As Bolsonaro’s star has fallen with the deepening crisis, the standing of his chief rival, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has risen precipitously. The pressure on Bolsonaro has forced the the normally intransigent far-right figure to shake up the way he conducts business.

Last month, while Covid-19 infection rates surged and the situation in Brazil became increasingly desperate, Lula won two important political victories in the Supreme Court, vacating corruption convictions against him and restoring his political rights for next year’s presidential election. Lula has since made a triumphant return to the political scene, even being embraced by former adversaries who now recognize him as the most viable alternative to Bolsonaro.

In addition to a series of well-received speeches and interviews, Lula was central to Brazil’s slowly improving vaccine forecast. He played a key role in negotiations with Russia to acquire Sputnik V doses and has made diplomatic approaches to China, the Biden administration, and the G20, requesting cooperation for dealing with the Covid-19 crisis and gaining glowing headlines along the way. Brazil’s relationships with all three trading partners have significantly deteriorated under Bolsonaro.

On Friday, Lula said in an interview that he intends to run for president again next year.

The former president currently leads the presidential polls and has clearly gotten under the skin of Bolsonaro, whose approval ratings are steadily falling. In one highly publicized speech, Lula said, “Planet Earth is round. It is not rectangular or square. Bolsonaro does not know that.” Bolsonaro responded by prominently placing a globe on his desk during his next weekly livestream. In a March 10 speech, Lula said, “A president who respected the country would have created a crisis committee” to deal with the Covid-19 crisis. Two weeks later, Bolsonaro announced the formation of just such a committee — more than a year after the pandemic began.

Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.

“Bolsonaro is the worst possible president at the worst time in Brazil, and the Brazilian people are suffering the consequences of that,” Molon, the opposition member of the lower house of Congress, told The Intercept. He said Bolsonaro’s actions “increase the risk of even more aggressive new variants emerging. Without a doubt, he is a danger to the country and to the whole world.”

Last month, Bolsonaro also finally yielded to mounting pressure, particularly from allies in Congress, to replace Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello, an active-duty army general currently under police investigation for his incompetent handling of the public health crisis. Bolsonaro also agreed to remove far-right, “anti-globalist” Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo, whose hard-line ideological positions were widely seen to be inhibiting international partnerships to fight the pandemic.

On the same day that Araújo was forced out, Bolsonaro replaced five other important figures: the ministers of defense, justice, and public security; his chief of staff; and the solicitor general. Rather than a gesture away from his extreme positions, the reshuffling was widely interpreted as a move to place staunch loyalists into key positions of power, an ominous sign considering his recent declarations in favor of instituting martial law in states that implemented lockdowns against his wishes. The following day, the heads of all three branches of the military resigned their posts in protest, an unprecedented, coordinated move.

Bolsonaro’s waffling and contradictory stances on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic may best be illustrated by the mini-drama playing out around his own plans to be vaccinated. Lula and Vice President Hamilton Mourão made photo ops out of their recent vaccinations to encourage the public. Last Thursday, Bolsonaro said he would decide only “after the last Brazilian was vaccinated,” but the following day, his office reportedly informed the Health Ministry that he would get his first shot over the weekend. The president’s Saturday photo op ended up being not a vaccination, but rather him eating a bowl of soup with his new defense minister, where he repeated his attacks against lockdown measures. Bolsonaro’s vaccination records have been classified for 100 years. His office did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The post Brazilian Congress Setting Up Corporations to Cut Covid-19 Vaccine Line appeared first on The Intercept.

Bolsonaro and his allies have repeatedly insisted that these protests in favor of overthrowing the legislature and undermining the Supreme Court are “spontaneous movements” by average supporters, but the Supreme Court has opened an investigation into who is behind them. Multiple members of Congress aligned with the president are suspected of organizing the events, including Bolsonaro’s sons.

Bolsonaro, who favors reopening the country against the advice of public health experts, is increasingly at war with anyone in the government who does not bend their knee to him, which includes representatives of almost every democratic institution in the country — stoking fears that Brazil is accelerating its slide toward another dictatorship.

Meanwhile, the Federal Police are investigating Bolsonaro and his politician sons for multiple suspected crimes; his former political party has called for his impeachment; his former Justice Minister Sergio Moro gave an eight-hour deposition to investigators alleging that the president politically interfered in law enforcement institutions; the public prosecutor — a recent Bolsonaro appointee — has asked for an investigation into Moro’s allegations against Bolsonaro; Supreme Court ministers have blocked multiple actions he has attempted to take in recent days; and the commander of the army has publicly contradicted his coronavirus denialism. That’s just a sampling of the battles underway. With the deck stacked so high against him, Bolsonaro is not signaling defeat or moderation, but rather that he is willing to go all out on his war against Brazilian democracy.

Bolsonaro is signaling that he is willing to go all out on his war against Brazilian democracy.

“I pray to God that we have no problems this week. We have reached the limit. There is no more conversation, from now on we will not only demand, we will make them follow the Constitution. It will be enforced at any price,” Bolsonaro told the admiring crowd in Brasília on Sunday, standing at the entrance of the Planalto presidential palace. Brazilian, American, and Israeli flags flew behind him. Bolsonaro has complained about what he feels is undue interference in his constitutionally mandated executive domain — particularly by the Supreme Court. He later added, “Enough interference. We are not going to allow for any more interference. No more patience.”

Bolsonaro addressed protesters who are explicitly advocating for the overthrow of democratic institutions, which is a crime in Brazil, where a string of military presidents ruled from 1964 to 1985 after a coup backed by the U.S. Bolsonaro and his vice president, retired Gen. Hamilton Mourão, have praised the military dictatorship throughout their careers, but Bolsonaro has gone further to even openly celebrate its widespread use of torture.

Whipped into a fervor at the rally, some of Bolsonaro’s supporters physically assaulted journalists who were covering the protest. Dida Sampaio, a photojournalist for O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, was pushed to the ground, kicked, and punched by protesters who yelled, “Trash,” “Get out,” and obscenities. Marco Pereira, a driver for the newspaper, had his legs kicked out from under him during the attack, and other journalists were verbally harassed. The incident provoked widespread condemnation from the national journalists’ union, news organizations, and political leaders. Bolsonaro later said he did not witness the attack but denied that his supporters were responsible. “If there was aggression, it was an infiltrator, some crazy person who should be punished,” he said.

Secure Power and Stifle Dissent

A political crisis erupted in Brazil late last month when Moro, the justice minister, resigned. Leaked chats between Moro and Bolsonaro suggested that the president wanted to replace Mauricio Valeixo as head of the Federal Police to halt investigations into presidential allies. Against Moro’s wishes, Bolsonaro fired Valeixo and appointed Alexandre Ramagem, director of Brazil’s intelligence agency, ABIN, and a close friend of his sons. That appointment was blocked by a decision from Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes before Ramagem could be sworn in. On Monday, Bolsonaro announced that Ramagem’s righthand man, Rolando Souza, would take the position and had him sworn in 20 minutes later. Souza’s first act in office was to replace the superintendent of the Federal Police in Rio de Janeiro, lending credence to Moro’s accusations; Rio de Janeiro is Bolsonaro’s home state and the jurisdiction where multiple investigations into his family are underway.

During the 15 months of the Bolsonaro administration, eight ministers have been fired or resigned — two in the past three weeks. Finance Minister Paulo Guedes was also recently on the defensive after publicly disagreeing with a Bolsonaro-backed economic plan that was put forward by the military. The president and allies are also currently pressuring Culture Minister Regina Duarte to resign.

During the 15 months of the Bolsonaro administration, eight ministers have been fired or resigned — two in the past three weeks.

The president is also reportedly considering the removal of the army’s top general, Edson Leal Pujol, to replace him with a younger and less qualified general named Luiz Eduardo Ramos, a close adviser to Bolsonaro who is reportedly very loyal to him. The news has rankled some in the military and led Ramos to publicly deny that the plan is being considered. Such a move is within his power as president, but would usually entail a serious justification, not purely political considerations. Pujol has put himself at odds with the president by calling the coronavirus pandemic “one of the greatest challenges in our history” and defending social isolation measures to limit its spread.

Separately, a legislative agency responsible for oversight of the executive branch requested an investigation into Bolsonaro for political interference into the military for revoking three decisions that would have increased oversight into weapons and munitions produced in Brazil, which is entirely under the purview of the military.

The day before the protest, Bolsonaro held an unscheduled meeting with top military leaders and the former military men in his cabinet to discuss the current political morass. According to the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, many of the generals agreed that the court was overstepping its constitutional authority. However, President of the Court José Antonio Dias Toffoli reportedly also felt that some of the rulings issued monocratically by his colleagues crossed the line into “judicial activism.”

Bolsonaro’s defense minister, a retired army general, issued a statement on Monday in which he reiterated the coronavirus’s threat to the population and disavowed attacks on journalists, but signaled that — speaking on behalf of the organizations he oversees — he agrees that the Supreme Court is overstepping its authority. The Armed Forces “consider independence and harmony between the [branches of government] to be essential to the governability of the country,” the statement said.

Flat-Footed Response

Brazil is quickly becoming one of the global hot spots of coronavirus infections. On Sunday, Brazil had the third-highest number of new deaths of any country in the world. Official statistics, which are widely understood to be dramatically underreported, show that Brazil has more than 105,000 cases and 7,321 deaths from Covid-19. In São Paulo, black Brazilians are 62 percent more likely to die from the disease than their white peers, a clear measure of the nation’s rampant inequality and government’s failures to address it.

As The Intercept reported, due to flawed certification procedures by federal authorities, 75 percent of Covid-19 tests available in Brazil are unreliable, many of which were even denied approval to be sold in the countries in which they are manufactured. Public health systems in many states are collapsing, and doctors are being forced to ration care. When questioned about the situation last week, Bolsonaro said, “So what? I lament it. What do you want me to do?”

Last month, Bolsonaro fired Health Minister Henrique Mandetta for publicly challenging him on the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and replaced him with the more complacent Nelson Teich, a health care executive and doctor. Sen. Kátia Abreu recently said in a press conference that Teich has proven to be “a little lost” in his job. “Where is the general planning?” Abreu remarked. Teich himself has admitted that the country is “navigating blind” in its Covid-19 response and angered public health officials by limiting the already scarce access to data on the public health situation. “The general sentiment is frustration,” said Rui Costa, governor of Bahia state, after a virtual meeting between governors and the new health minister.

Despite being widely criticized for his perceived inaction, Teich was able to push through an illegal measure to block Cuban doctors from returning to Brazil to help prop up collapsing regional health care systems. In 2013, the presidential administration of Dilma Rousseff began to bring in thousands of Cuban doctors to serve communities in the most remote reaches of the country, where it was difficult to attract Brazilian professionals. Bolsonaro, who campaigned heavily against an imaginary communist threat, made clear that he would end the program after he won the presidential election in 2018, so Cuba canceled the contract and recalled its doctors. Some of the Cuban health care professionals stuck around, hoping to be able to continue working in Brazil outside of the intergovernmental program, but the administration has repeatedly blocked them from getting certified for ideological reasons.

“I’m sure of one thing: We have the people on our side, we have the Armed Forces on the side of the people in the name of law, order, democracy, and freedom. And most importantly, we have God with us,” Bolsonaro told supporters Sunday. At least part of the claim is false: The president’s approval rating has dropped to 27 percent, down 24 percentage points since he took office last January. In the coming weeks and months, the Armed Forces and God — usually more abstruse — will have to reveal which side they are on.

The post Brazil’s President Goes to War With Democratic Institutions — and Hopes the Military Has His Back appeared first on The Intercept.