Jair Bolsonaro

The Amazon will play a critical role in determining the future of life on Earth, given the climate regulating role the rainforest plays, writes Thiago Ávila.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro persists in his attitude of denial, characterising the coronavirus as a “little flu”: a definition that deserves to be included in the annals, not of medicine, but of political madness, writes Michael Lowy. But this madness has its logic, which is the logic of neofascism.

Already immersed in an overlapping health and economic crisis, Brazil is now also being engulfed by a political crisis. Sao Paulo University professor André Singer outlines some of the key dynamics underpinning the current situation in Brazil.

I spent last week in the Brazilian Amazon in Porto Velho, Rondonia, on the edge of what is called the arco do incendios. The “arc of fires” is a region stretching along the yet-to-be-paved highways 319 and 230, between the towns of Humaitá and Apui in Southern Amazonas, a state that still had 98% of its virgin rainforest intact as of last year.

Since Brazil’s 2016 parliamentary coup d’etat, in which former president Dilma Rousseff was removed on a later-exonerated technicality, Brazil’s ultra-right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro has made every effort to destroy any remnants of the legacy left by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT).

A nationwide education strike on May 15 became the platform for the biggest anti-government protests since President Jair Bolsonaro took power.

Brazilian solidarity activists rallied in Sydney on April 7.

Speakers called for the release of jailed former Brazilian president Lula Da Silva and spoke out against the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro and its attacks on democracy.

 

Brazil’s far-right government of President Jair Bolsonaro will seek to classify “invasions” of farmland by landless workers as akin to terrorism, with harsher penalties for the activists, an Agriculture Ministry official said on January 14.

Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), one of Latin America’s largest social movements, seeks to take over unproductive lands in the name of social and economic justice to more equally distribute rural wealth.

Brazil is going through a profound political crisis, probably more serious than the military coup in 1964 that ushered in 25 years of authoritarian rule, writes Sue Bradford.

After his election as president in October, the neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro began selecting his ministers. His most important decision — and one that will probably change the destiny of Brazil for many decades — was to choose Paulo Guedes, an advocate of extreme free-market economics, as a super-minister, responsible for a hugely-expanded finance ministry.

Shockwaves were sent around the world when fascist candidate Jair Bolsonaro won 55% in the second round in Brazil’s presidential elections on October 28, defeating Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party (PT).

Within 24 hours of Brazil’s election result being announced, protesters gathered outside the Brazilian consulate in Sydney to express their opposition to president-elect Jair Bolsonaro and his fascist agenda.

Far-right candidate Bolsonaro was elected president in a second round run-off against Workers’ Party (PT) candidate Fernando Haddad on October 28.

Brian Mier, editor of Brasil Wire and Voices of the Brazilian Left: Dispatches From a Coup in Progress, spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Federico Fuentes about the victory of fascist candidate Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential elections, and what it means for the coming period.