On June 10, 2020, the New York Times ran a front page article headlined “Coup Threats Rattle Brazil as Virus Deaths Surge”. To seasoned Brazil watchers this was not in itself shocking. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. President Jair Bolsonaro and his far-right supporters have threatened such an “auto-coup”; […]
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 […]
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 […]
On Sunday May 17, Jair Bolsonaro again joined demonstrations by supporters of his government calling for military intervention and the closure of the Supreme Court and National Congress. Without mentioning the current president, six of Brazil’s former defence ministers have responded by asking the military to follow the Constitution and defend Brazil’s democratic institutions. In a […]
Academy-award nominated director Petra Costa has posted on social media in response to the Bolsonaro-led protests on Sunday 19th April 2020, which although small in number, were a blatant call for a new “AI-5” i.e. a return to the darkest period of the military dictatorship – specifically closure of Congress and the Supreme Court. Costa […]
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 […]
On Monday 13th April, word began to spread that Brazil’s high profile Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, having been saved from dismissal by the Military just a week earlier, had lost their support. Rumour was that Mandetta had upset the Generals in a frank interview with TV Globo’s Fantástico, the previous night. By Thursday 16th he was […]
Buried under a global pandemic is the most important Brazil story for decades. Unless the role of the United States in Brazil’s democratic collapse is acknowledged and understood, no useful sense can be made of its present, or its future, and no honest appraisal can be made of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. […]
The military won’t officially take over because nobody wants to be publically associated with the worst government in Brazilian history By Leonardo Attuch Bolsonaro’s pen has less and less ink in it. Every day that goes by shows that he is losing power. This was shown during his April 9 live address to the Brazilian […]
As the saga of an “Operational President” rolls on, former editor of Folha de Pernambuco and Diario de Pernambuco, Homero Fonseca, unpicks the details and concludes that whatever the Military’s intent, Bolsonaro will not go quietly. by Homero Fonseca The unprecedented, frantic and surreal political events of the past few days have confirmed two things: 1 – […]