By John McEvoy Exclusive. Recently declassified documents reveal Britain’s enthusiastic support for Brazil’s 1964-85 dictatorship. Racist and colonial in tone, the files expose a secret propaganda unit infiltrating opposition media, and further evidence of covert training in torture. The ‘assiduous cultivation’ of Samuel Wainer In a 1969 file entitled ‘Information Research Department: operations in Brazil’, declassified only […]
The Brazilian military dictatorship might not have been very good at building dams or highways, but it was excellent at hiding bodies. Is this why Bolsonaro appointed an army general with no medical experience as Minister of Health in the middle of its worst pandemic in a generation? By Brian Mier In 2005 I worked […]
By Felipe Milanez and Samuel Vida Tragedies are always socially unequal and expose in a striking way historically constructed inequalities, for example in the degree of exposure to risks and the way vulnerabilities are shaped. The new Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus is a non-human agent from a zoonosis that infects people and causes respiratory infections; it was […]
On Friday 22nd May 2020, Brazil eagerly anticipated the broadcast of a Bolsonaro cabinet meeting which took place exactly one month earlier on April 22. The video, whose release was mandated by Supreme Court Minister Celso de Mello, had already been the subject of various leaks to the media, and was rumoured to contain scandalous, possibly […]
To hundreds of supporters who waited for him in front of the army headquarters in Brasilia, holding signs calling for shutting down Congress and the Supreme Court, a tired and weak looking President Jair Bolsonaro asks people to “give their lives for the fatherland”. In what is now a regular occurrence, President Jair Bolsonaro left […]
In conversation about the past and the present, Manuel Domingos Neto reflects on the role of the Armed Forces in Brazil. By Cristiane Sampaio and Pedro Stropasolas. Brasil de Fato In these times when the military presence takes shape in varied compartments of Brazilian politics, it is from memory and history that the writer Manuel […]
For Héctor Luís Saint-Pierre, it is a military paradox to support the deregulation of the economy and the sell-off of assets. By Ana Penido. Brasil de Fato. 26 October 2019. With the broad participation of the military in the Jair Bolsonaro government, there is more interest in understanding which ideas carry this special category of […]
Brazilian director Petra Costa, whose third full length feature, ‘The Edge of Democracy’ has been nominated in the best documentary category at the 2020 Oscars, was interviewed on the Michael Brooks Show on Friday 30th January 2020, just over one week before the ceremony, at which the film is tipped to win Brazil’s first ever […]
By Cynara Menezes Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine Jair Bolsonaro would become President of Brazil. To me he was always just a bad joke – an evil folk character and B-level politician who would never rise to greater heights. Imagine my surprise and displeasure to see that millions of Brazilians would vote […]
As Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro launches his new brazenly Neofascist party ‘Alliance for Brazil’, inspired by ARENA (Alliance for National Renewal) of the Dictatorship era, his ministers and foreign supporters are normalising a return to the repression of the 1960s and 1970s to protect their economic interests. Paulo Guedes, Bolsonaro’s Chicago Schooled Finance Minister, says […]