Analysis of Brazil’s conjuncture is rendered useless by pretense that the 2022 election is business as usual. On April 9 Brazil’s Workers Party (PT) and the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) held a special press conference. It was a quietly sensational event. After months of rumour and noise, it was the first official confirmation that Lula’s […]
On the fifth anniversary of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, the role foreign media played in propagandising for it still warrants further investigation. Little of international media coverage of Brazil’s 2016 coup and its centrepiece, the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, has dated well. But one opinion piece in US newspaper the New York Times stands out […]
It will be assumed by many outside that to describe Brazil’s pandemic as genocide is an exaggeration. Unfortunately it isn’t. From suppressing vaccines to refusing Brazilian states and municipalities the right to implement lockdown measures, it is wrong for international media to report Bolsonaro’s Covid-19 catastrophe as mismanagement, incompetence, or “failure to act”, when it […]
A week after charges against former president Lula were annulled, invigorating the Brazilian left to unite and challenge neofascist Jair Bolsonaro, US magazine Americas Quarterly responded with the kind of cynical propaganda we should always expect from it. Having enthusiastically supported the lawfare campaign against him, the AQ piece was an attack on Lula and the […]
How would Brazilian handling of the Covid-19 pandemic have been different if Bolsonaro had never come to power? April 2018: Facing international outcry, denunciation at the UN, and the threat of economic retaliation from its principal trading partner, China, Brazil’s Armed Forces have abandoned their efforts to exclude former president Lula da Silva from the […]
Left wing politicians and commentators who endorsed operation Lava Jato are now under fire for unwittingly helping bring about a Bolsonaro presidency, in what is now being called ‘The greatest judicial scandal in history‘. As Army-decorated former Judge Sergio Moro and the US-backed Lava Jato task force fall from grace in what has been called […]
Military string pulling in Brazil’s “long coup” which returned them to government becomes clearer with confessions from the now terminally ill former head of the armed forces who oversaw it. Through an exhaustive series of interviews, adding up to thirteen hours in total, General Villas Bôas revealed a rekindled desire to remove the left from […]
Former journalist and rock musician João Santana ascended to become one of Brazil’s most influential people, a high profile political strategist with his unique talents in demand at home and abroad. He then became a target. One of the forgotten victims of Operation Lava Jato, he has finally broken silence, eighteen months since his release from […]
On Friday 21 August, Folha de S.Paulo, one of Brazil’s biggest and most influential newspapers, ran an editorial entitled “Jair Rousseff”. It provoked an immediate backlash with any commentators since stating that they were abandoning Folha altogether. In the editorial, Folha equated the public spending record of Dilma Rousseff with that of Jair Bolsonaro. It […]
We are writing this in shock and grief at the sudden passing of our friend, journalist and broadcaster Michael Brooks. Michael had been a supporter, a collaborator and an ally to Brasil Wire for some years now, and this grew into friendship. His recent book ‘Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right’ […]