The Brazilian Trump

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The man chosen to run the government foundation promoting black culture has called for Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day to be scrapped and has branded many of Brazil’s best-known black celebrities and artists “parasites of the black race”. Most notoriously, he once called one of Brazil’s most celebrated samba composers, Martinho da Vila, a “bum” who should “be sent to the Congo”.

'Unqualified, dangerous': the oddball officials running Bolsonaro's Brazil | World news | The Guardian

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Brazilian federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cyber crimes over his role in the publication of articles based on leaked cellphone messages from Brazilian government officials.  The New York Times reported that prosecutors accused Greenwald, who is the co-founding editor of The Intercept, as being a member of a “criminal organization” that hacked into phones of Brazilian officials last year. The charges were brought against Greenwald months after Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro warned that Greenwald would “do jail time in Brazil” following the publication of private phone conversations involving Brazilian Justice Minister Sergio Moro. 

In a statement Tuesday, Greenwald strongly pushed back against the charges. “Less than two months ago, after examining the same evidence cited today by Brazil’s Public Ministry, the Federal Police stated that not only have I never committed any crimes in my contacts with our source, but also that I exercised extreme caution as a journalist,” Greenwald said.

New: In statement, @ggreenwald says the accusation "is an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations" reported in The Intercept pic.twitter.com/YSIK4UIgqK
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 21, 2020

He added that the new accusation “is an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister Moro and the Bolsonaro government.” These phone conversations were published as part of a series by The Intercept, with the stories raising concerns about corruption within the Brazilian government, including the possibility that Moro had worked to shield Bolsonaro's son, federal Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, from scrutiny from an anti-corruption investigation. Moro subsequently announced that four individuals were arrested for allegedly hacking the phones involved and leaking information to The Intercept and to Greenwald. 

Brazilian prosecutors charge American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cyber crimes | TheHill

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The film focuses on two pre-Bolsonaro events: the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the 2017 corruption conviction, and ultimate imprisonment, of Rousseff’s party compatriot, Lula da Silva, when Lula was leading all polls by a substantial margin for the 2018 presidential race. Both Rousseff and Lula are members of the center-left Workers’ party (PT).

Bolsonaro’s path to power was paved by the imprisonment of Lula and subsequent barring of him from the 2018 race – a result secured by a dubious probe, nicknamed Car Wash, by then judge Sérgio Moro. After Bolsonaro’s win, Moro – in a transaction which even many of his longtime supporters viewed as having the stench of a quid pro quo – was rewarded by Bolsonaro with a huge promotion, from low-level judge in the mid-sized city of Curitiba to the all-powerful minister of justice and public security.


Since then, a massive leaked archive of secret conversations (reported by the Intercept) has revealed serious wrongdoing by Moro and the anti-corruption prosecutors he led. The revelations may have contributed to the Brazilian supreme court’s decision to free Lula from prison in November last year. (Disclosure: my husband, Glenn Greenwald, is a co-founder of the Intercept and the journalist who received that archive.) Costa’s film suggests that the reputed corruption  and authoritarian tendencies of Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far right were visible long before the Intercept showed the definitive proof to the world.

A new film argues that Brazil teeters on the brink of authoritarianism. It's true | David Miranda | Opinion | The Guardian

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The campaign in Brazil against the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald could hardly look more personal. The country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, suggested last year that the American “may do jail time”, and has used homophobic slurs against him. Mr Greenwald and his husband, the Brazilian congressman David Miranda, have faced not only lies and verbal attacks but death threats: “Neither my husband, nor I, nor our children, have left our house in the last year without armed security, armoured vehicles, teams of security,” he said this week.

Now Mr Greenwald, an outspoken critic of the president, has been charged with cybercrimes over the publication of leaked phone messages apparently showing collusion between prosecutors and Sérgio Moro, then a judge, but now justice minister. They fuelled concerns about the huge Car Wash anti-corruption investigation: while it uncovered shocking abuses, it also raised suspicions of political bias. Mr Moro oversaw the trial that led to the jailing of the popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose conviction eased Mr Bolsonaro’s election.

The case against Mr Greenwald accuses him of “facilitating the commission of a crime”. The journalist says he was extremely careful not to take part in any crime, and neither federal police nor a supreme court justice found grounds to pursue him. Many are shocked by the prosecutor’s decision to charge Mr Greenwald nonetheless. But Mr Bolsonaro and his allies regularly demonstrate their contempt for institutions. What better way to spread the message that authorities can act with impunity, instilling fear – especially when the target is a high-profile US citizen?

The Guardian view on the case against Glenn Greenwald: an outrage in Brazil and beyond | Editorial | Opinion | The Guardian

• Journalist going out having to have armed bodyguards and facing death threats and prosecution for doing their job, this authoritarianism, if not outright fascism
  

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Substantial media coverage over the last year, within Brazil and internationally, has been devoted to threats and attacks we each received, separately and together, due to our work – David’s as a congressman and Glenn’s as a journalist. These incidents have been depicted, rightfully so, as reflective of the increasingly violent and anti-democratic climate prevailing in Brazil as a result of the far-right, authoritarian, dictatorship-supporting movement of President Jair Bolsonaro, which consolidated substantial power in the election held at the end of 2018.

There was much discussion when David entered congress in early 2019 after the only other openly LGBTQ+ congress member, Jean Wyllys, fled his seat and the country in fear of his life. As a longtime LGBTQ+ celebrity and sole LGBTQ+ member of Congress, Wyllys had endured constant death threats and even bullying from fellow members of congress. His multiple fights with Bolsonaro and his sons made him a particular object of contempt by that movement. That they now occupied full-scale power made his remaining in Brazil untenable.

That Wyllys was replaced by another LGBTQ+ congress member provoked a contentious exchange between David and Bolsonaro that went viral on Twitter. David’s substantially increased visibility as the new LGBTQ+ member of Congress provoked countless and highly detailed death threats from the Bolsonaro movement toward our family. That David, in 2016, had become the first-ever elected LGBTQ+ member of the Rio city council already had made him a target of much animus in a city dominated by paramilitary gangs and rightwing evangelical groups.

But his new status as the only openly LGBTQ+ member of the lower house of the federal congress made him a prime target of the vitriolic anti-LGBTQ+ Bolsonaro movement. That primal animus was enhanced by the fact that our public 15-year marriage and our two children serve as a living refutation of the false and toxic depiction of LGBTQ+ life as barren, unhappy, sickly and solitary, an anti-LGBTQ+ demonization campaign that is central to the Bolsonaro movement’s political identity.

A massive new wave of media coverage about our family was triggered when Glenn and the Intercept began their series of explosive exposés last June about rampant corruption at the highest levels of the Bolsonaro government, provoking a wave of violent threats, official acts of reprisals and a powerful fake news machine erected by the Bolsonaro movement against their enemies. All of those seemingly endless multipronged attacks culminated last week in criminal charges brought against Glenn by a far-right prosecutor that have been widely condemned domestically and internationally as legally frivolous and a blatant assault on a free press.

But the sense of danger and political violence in our lives, and for many others in Brazil, began almost two years ago. On 14 March 2018, Marielle Franco – the LGBTQ+, black, favela-raised city councilwoman from Rio de Janeiro – was gunned down while riding in her car on the streets of Rio at roughly 9pm in a brutal political assassination. Marielle was one of our family’s best friends as well as a rising political star, a vessel of hope to so many people marginalized for decades and who had no voice. The loss was a major trauma, still unhealed, for both the country and for our lives.

The far-right Bolsonaro movement wants us dead. But we will not give up | Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda | Opinion | The Guardian

• Threats and intimidation against political opponents is fascism
  
• The rest of the article compounds this.
  

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Early on, prominent members of Bolsonaro’s political party started a campaign to encourage university and high school students to covertly film their teachers and denounce them for “ideological indoctrination”. This persecution campaign, ominously called “School Without Party”, created a sense of intimidation and fear in educational institutions in a country barely three decades out of an oppressive military regime. Last month, Bolsonaro suggested that the state should censor textbooks to promote conservative values 

The Bolsonaro administration has made it clear it will not tolerate deviation from its ultra-conservative politics and worldview. Last year the administration fired the marketing director of Banco do Brasil, Delano Valentim, for creating an ad campaign promoting diversity and inclusion, which was then censored by the government. Later that year, as Brazil’s Amazon forest burned at an alarming rate, Bolsonaro’s administration retaliated against scientists who dared to present facts. Ricardo Galvão, the former director of Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), was removed from his post for releasing satellite data on deforestation in the Amazon. The government is also dangerously hostile to the media. On 21 January this year, the federal prosecutor’s office opened a baseless investigation into the American journalist Glenn Greenwald and his team for participating in an alleged conspiracy to hack the cellphone of Brazilian authorities. The prosecution, a clear attack on freedom of the press, was a response to a series of exposés that Greenwald and the Intercept published concerning possible corruption in Bolsonaro’s inner circle.

This is not an isolated case. Government officials throughout the country, from regional courts to the military police, have taken it upon themselves to ideologically defend Bolsonaro and curtail free expression. In 2019 alone, there were 208 reported attacks on media and journalists in Brazil.

Democracy and freedom of expression are under threat in Brazil | Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Sebastião Salgado, Arnaldo Antunes, Djamila Ribeiro, Milton Hatoum, Petra Costa and others | Opinion | The Guardian

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Jair Bolsonaro’s apparent endorsement of protests designed to cow Brazil’s democratic institutions has sparked outrage across the political spectrum with one lawmaker warning of a return to the dark days of dictatorship if the demonstrations are not opposed. Hardcore supporters of Brazil’s far-right president are planning nationwide protests on 15 March and have been flooding social media with propaganda videos and fliers attacking members of Congress – and even proposing a return to military rule under Bolsonaro.

Outrage as Jair Bolsonaro appears to endorse Brazil anti-democracy protests | World news | The Guardian

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Two indigenous leaders have been shot dead and two others wounded in Brazil’s Maranhão state, in an attack not far from where a prominent tribesman who defended the Amazon rainforest was killed last month, authorities said. The attack on the members of the Guajajara tribe, which is known for the forest guardians who protect their territory against illegal deforestation, occurred on the margins of a federal highway near El-Betel village in the country’s north-east on Saturday.

Amazon indigenous leaders killed in Brazil drive-by shooting | World news | The Guardian

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A new investigation has linked the world’s biggest meat company JBS, and its rival Marfrig, to a farm whose owner is implicated in one of the most brutal Amazonian massacres in recent memory. The report by Repórter Brasil comes as JBS faces growing pressure over transparency failings in its Amazon cattle supply chain.

On 19 April 2017, nine men were brutally murdered in what became known as the “Colniza massacre”. The men had been squatting on remote forest land in the state of Mato Grosso when their bodies were found, according to court documents. Some showed signs of torture; some had been stabbed, others shot. According to charges filed by state prosecutors in Mato Grosso, the massacre was carried out by a gang known as “the hooded ones”. The aim, they said, was to terrify locals, take over land they lived on and extract valuable natural resources. The first reporter to reach the lawless, far-flung region only got there a week later.

World's biggest meat company linked to 'brutal massacre' in Amazon | Environment | The Guardian

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Two weeks ago, March 11, Italy – so far the world’s hardest hit country – had 12,462 coronavirus cases. Now it’s reporting 69,176. Looks skyrocketing. But look closer. It’s a 455 percent increase – compared to the 2,550 percent leap Italy experienced the previous two weeks. The rate, while still tragically high, slowed. Now cross the pond. On March 11 the U.S. had 1,301 cases; today it’s 55,225 – a 4,100 percent rise. Brazil two weeks ago had just 52 cases – but now has 2,271. A 4,300 percent jump.

Bolsonaro Oblivion: Why Brazil's COVID-19 Future Is Likely Worse Than It Looks | WLRN

Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has tried to reassure his citizens over the threat of coronavirus by claiming Brazilians can bathe in excrement “and nothing happens”. As Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll rose to 77, Bolsonaro scotched the idea Latin America’s biggest economy could soon face a situation as severe as the United States, where there have been more than 1,000 deaths and more than 83,000 cases. “I don’t think it will reach that point,” Bolsonaro told reporters outside the presidential palace in the capital, Brasília. “Not least because Brazilians need to be studied,” the right-wing populist added. “They never catch anything. You see some bloke jumping into the sewage, he gets out, has a dive, right? And nothing happens to him.” Brazil gangs impose strict curfews to slow coronavirus spread Read more Without offering any scientific evidence, Bolsonaro continued: “I think it’s even possible lots of people have already been infected in Brazil, a few weeks or months ago, and have already got the antibodies that help it not to proliferate”. Facts do not support Bolsonaro’s insinuation that Brazilians are somehow immune to dangerous infections. On Thursday Brazil’s health ministry said that its coronavirus death toll had risen to 77, up from 46 on Tuesday. So far 2,915 cases have been confirmed.

Jair Bolsonaro claims Brazilians 'never catch anything' as Covid-19 cases rise | Global development | The Guardian