The Square of the Three Powers in Brasília is the constitutional center of Brazil. Anchored on three sides by the glass cube of the Supreme Federal Court, the canopied parallelogram of the Planalto Palace, which contains the offices of the president and other high-ranking officials, and the twin towers of the Congress building, it was intended by the capital’s planners in the 1950s to embody the harmonious coexistence of the three branches of government.
On the evening of November 13, Francisco Wanderley Luiz, a right-wing conspirator and supporter of former president Jair Bolsonaro, crossed the square with the intention, his ex-wife said later, of killing supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes. The Bolsonaristas hate Moraes because of the many orders and rulings he has issued against them in the name of protecting democracy and fighting disinformation. Luiz was challenged by security guards and, after tossing a bomb in the direction of the court—it detonated harmlessly—killed himself by falling on a second bomb at the foot of a statue of blindfolded Justice. Luiz had warned the police in an online post that “you have 72 hours to disarm the bomb that is in the house of communist shit.” That was a reference to a third bomb, planted in a car that he had parked in an annex of the Congress building, which also detonated, damaging only the car.
“Democracy does not simply have the right to defend itself,” Moraes told Bruno Meyerfeld, the Brazil correspondent of Le Monde, to whom he granted a rare interview in 2023; “it has an obligation to do so.” Meyerfeld noted that the judge, whose shaved head is part of his pugilistic public image, had arranged his office furniture “in such a way that he would not be surprised by a possible assailant.”
The conflict between Moraes and the Brazilian far right may best be understood as a clash between two forms of authoritarianism: one that defends democratic institutions even at the expense of individual liberties, and one whose free-speech absolutism fosters a public discourse so abusive and scurrilous that it becomes impossible for those institutions to thrive. From his position on one of the most powerful courts in the world, Moraes has frozen bank accounts, suspended officials, and ordered police raids and preventive detentions. In August he blocked access to X in Brazil until the platform reluctantly complied with his demand that it ban accounts spreading Bolsonaro’s baseless claim that the 2022 presidential election, which he lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had been rigged.
Lula, as the president is known, made his name in the 1970s as the head of the metalworkers’ union in São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema, two of a cluster of cities near the Atlantic coast that are home to the Brazilian auto industry, and as an opponent of the military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. In 1980 he cofounded the leftist Workers’ Party and in 2002 was elected president, winning a second term four years later. Under Lula the economy boomed, poverty decreased, and the deforestation of the Amazon slowed. When he stepped down in 2011, he enjoyed an approval rating of almost 90 percent but was subsequently engulfed in a huge corruption case, known as Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), that led to the impeachment and removal from office of his successor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. The following year Lula was sentenced to prison for accepting emoluments from firms that had won contracts during his presidency, and in 2018 public disgust with corruption propelled the far-right Bolsonaro, a former army captain and perennial Congress nonentity, to the Planalto Palace.
Bolsonaro oversaw the second-highest Covid-19 death toll in the world (after the United States), proposed that all members of the Workers’ Party be shot, and advised a journalist who inquired about the protection of nature to “take a shit every other day.” As deforestation surged in the Amazon and its indigenous people were expelled by miners and cattle ranchers, he kept his supporters happy with generous emergency aid payments during the pandemic and antiwoke diatribes. In 2021 Lula’s sentence was overturned by the supreme court, and he reentered politics; the former president was now a divisive figure—the words Lula Ladrão, or “Lula the thief,” were scrawled on walls across the country—but he was buoyed by his supporters’ belief that his prosecution had been politically motivated.
Bolsonaro spent the 2022 presidential campaign casting doubt on Brazil’s electronic voting system. On October 30, the day of the runoff against Lula, his allies in the Federal Highway Police set up roadblocks in the northeast of the country—a leftist stronghold—to keep voters from the polling stations. Moraes summoned the head of the highway police and threatened to jail him. The roadblocks disappeared, and that evening Lula was declared the winner with 50.9 percent of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent—the narrowest margin of victory since the end of the dictatorship.
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Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party—a misleading name—refused to recognize the outcome and petitioned the Superior Electoral Court, of which Moraes was president, to invalidate any votes recorded by voting machines that lacked identification numbers, which would have overturned the election. Moraes fined the party 22.9 million reais for acting in bad faith. Why 22.9 million? The digits 2, 2, and 9 add up to 13, the electoral number of Lula’s Workers’ Party. (Each party has an assigned number for ease of identification on election day.) The Bolsonaristas, wrote the journalist Ana Clara Costa in her account of the election in the investigative magazine Piauí, “understood that it could only be a taunt by Moraes.”
On January 8, 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration and in avowed emulation of the invasion of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., by the supporters of Donald Trump, thousands of Bolsonaristas overran the Square of the Three Powers. By the time they were ejected by police three hours later, the Planalto and the Congress and supreme court buildings had been ransacked. Bolsonaro had already fled to Florida, perhaps fearing for his freedom once his presidential immunity lapsed. Three months later he returned to Brazil, where judicial inquiries were underway.
In February 2024, Bolsonaro’s passport was confiscated. (This January the supreme court refused his request to have it temporarily returned so he could attend Trump’s inauguration.) A few months later the Superior Electoral Court convicted him of abuse of power and banned him from seeking public office for eight years. The Federal Police have recommended that he face charges of embezzlement and falsifying the Covid vaccination record that he used when entering the US. Most damning of all, in November Moraes released an 884-page report that “demonstrates irrefutably” that Bolsonaro and dozens of his allies—including his vice-presidential running mate, Walter Braga Netto; the former justice minister; and the former head of the navy—had set up a “criminal organization whose objective was to launch a coup d’état and eradicate the democratic state of law.” According to the report, shortly after the 2022 election Bolsonaro finalized the wording of a decree that would have formed “the legal basis for the coup d’état” by preventing Lula’s inauguration, establishing a state of emergency, and challenging the legality of the electoral process. In statements to the police, the former commanders of the army and air force attested that they had been pressured to join the coup but refused.
Also in November the police arrested four members of the army special forces and one of their own agents on suspicion of planning to assassinate Lula before his inauguration, possibly “using poison or chemicals to cause an organ collapse.” Plans were also allegedly made to kill his running mate and current vice-president, Geraldo Alckmin, as well as Moraes. The record of the conspirators’ movements on December 15, 2022, certainly suggests a surveillance operation targeting Moraes. In one exchange of messages the conspirators set a budget of 100,000 reais for an undisclosed operation, while in another they discussed armaments that would be required, including an AT4 rocket launcher capable of penetrating armor. Bolsonaro, the report states, was “fully aware” of the plan, which was aborted thanks to “circumstances beyond [his] control.”
The police’s recommendation that charges be brought against Bolsonaro and thirty-six co-conspirators is now with the chief prosecutor. Netto’s arrest on December 14 prompted speculation that Bolsonaro would be next. Yet Lula’s political survival shows that in Brazilian justice, impunity is more common than punishment. In recent years the supreme court has overturned no fewer than 115 convictions related to the Lava Jato case on the grounds that investigators, prosecutors, and judges broke laws in order to secure them. Much of the evidence for the plot against Moraes was gathered with a delação premiada, a dubious legal instrument through which defendants receive reduced sentences in exchange for confessing to crimes, providing evidence, and incriminating others. An opinion poll conducted in December found that while 51 percent of Brazilians believe that there was a coup plot, 38 percent do not.
After the release of the evidence against him, Bolsonaro’s social media feeds featured clips of him and Trump, including one showing the moment in 2018 when Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach while campaigning and another showing the bloodied Trump raising his fist after being shot last July. “Trump is back,” Bolsonaro told The Wall Street Journal, “and it’s a sign we’ll be back too.” According to Guilherme Casarões, a senior fellow at the Brazilian Center for International Relations, the Bolsonaristas hope that Trump will use the threat of sanctions and other punitive measures to pressure the Brazilian authorities to let Bolsonaro run in the 2026 presidential election.
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Bolsonaro has already confounded predictions that his record in office and the debacle of January 8, 2023, would finish him politically. In October’s municipal elections, candidates from the far right and center right, including many who cite Bolsonaro as an inspiration, won control of 63 percent of Brazil’s 5,569 towns and twenty of its twenty-six regional capitals. Left-wing parties, including the Workers’ Party, won control of just 752 municipalities and only one regional capital, Fortaleza. In the São Paulo runoff the center-right mayor, Ricardo Nunes, comfortably defeated the candidate of the left, Guilherme Boulos, though both were almost surpassed in the first round by a little-known insurgent from the far right, Pablo Marçal, a lifestyle coach and online influencer.
The politicization of the law and the sleaziness of public life have left Brazilians deeply skeptical of their institutions. In November I spent an afternoon in the Congress building trying to buttonhole lawmakers in the powerful agribusiness and evangelical caucuses—in vain because the chamber was in closed session. As we tramped up and down the endless corridors, which were full of staffers, petitioners, and hangers-on, my local fixer, the discerning, informed, usually stoical Diego, turned to me and said, “I would prefer to have my nails extracted one by one than to spend an afternoon in the Congress building.”
According to the news website Congresso em Foco, in 2022 (the last year for which figures are available), 115 out of 513 deputies from the lower house and eighteen out of eighty-one senators were being pursued for criminal, administrative, or electoral violations. During last autumn’s municipal election campaign the Federal Police seized 50 million reais in undeclared campaign funds, making the election officially the dirtiest in Brazilian history.
The US caps congressional earmarks at 1 percent of discretionary spending. In Brazil in 2024 the figure was 24 percent, up from 2 percent in 2015. Each deputy in the lower house had 38 million reais ($6.3 million) to give away and each senator almost double that amount. In the office of one congressman I found a mayor who had just arrived from his home state of Minas Gerais seeking an earmark to finance the drilling of wells and the construction of an ecotourism resort. There is, naturally, a correlation between the size and number of the earmarks that are secured by mayors and councilors and their chances of reelection. As the Folha de S. Paulo, one of Brazil’s biggest newspapers, reported, in October’s elections 114 of the 116 mayors who had received the most money from earmarks won with more than 50 percent of the vote.
Lula’s government has presided over strong growth and high employment, but generous welfare payments have led to fears of inflation and pressure on the Brazilian real. In November the government announced that it would extend income tax relief for the poor. The markets reacted badly, and the real fell below the symbolic threshold of six to the US dollar. TS Lombard, a London-based analysis firm, informed its clients that “the government cannot shake off its populist leanings.”
The Brazilian Congress is socially conservative and economically liberal. In November a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion under any circumstances was passed in committee. (The law currently permits abortion when the mother’s life is at risk, when the fetus has been diagnosed with a fatal brain defect, and in cases of rape.) The following month the lower house approved a bill providing for the chemical castration of pedophiles. Another piece of draft legislation in the works would reduce the percentage of land that farmers in the Amazon are obliged to exclude from production from 80 percent to 50 percent. According to the Forest Code Observatory, an environmental monitoring body, that would imperil 4.6 million hectares of rainforest. Last year the agriculture lobby secured an exemption for agriculture and livestock from a bill to create a regulated carbon market and helped pass a law restricting land claims by indigenous people.
The day after Trump’s victory I paid my second visit to the Square of the Three Powers. “There are six powers in Brazil,” the Uber driver corrected me, adding, “the drug traffickers, the militias, and the evangelists.” By “militias” he meant paramilitary groups, often linked to the police, that have taken over many neighborhoods in the big cities.
I had an appointment with Celso Amorim, Lula’s foreign policy adviser, in the Planalto Palace. The Brazilian media had been showing pictures of the back of Lula’s neck with a line of stitches, the result of a fall in the shower. Amorim assured me that Lula was physically “very strong” and would in all likelihood run again in the 2026 election, when he will be eighty.
Amorim is a courteous Francophile globalist—a dying breed. As Lula’s foreign minister between 2003 and 2010, he was the advocate of a multipolar world order in which Brazil would gain wealth and influence through its membership in the G20 and the BRICS group of emerging economies, which it founded in 2009 along with China, Russia, and India. For a while the plan worked; even after the financial crash of 2008 the economy grew by almost 3.5 percent a year, in part because of Chinese demand for Brazilian soybeans and iron ore. It didn’t hurt that the down-to-earth Lula—that rare head of state who knows his way around the engine of a Volkswagen Beetle—never willingly made an enemy. As Amorim recalled with a smile, “Only Lula could say ‘companero Bush’ one day and ‘companero Fidel’ the next!”
Two decades later, amicable multipolarity is a quaint notion, and Brazil has revised its ambitions. “We want good relations with the US and China,” Amorim told me, respectively the country’s biggest source of investment and its biggest trading partner. But it is no longer easy to be everyone’s friend.
Lula never hid his preference for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. On November 16 his wife, Rosângela da Silva, said, “Fuck you, Elon Musk,” at a public event. Musk replied on X, “They are going to lose the next election”—ominous words when you consider that the invasion of the Square of the Three Powers was orchestrated on social media. Four days later the Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Brasília, where he and Lula signed thirty-seven agreements, including a $690 million loan to Brazil’s development bank denominated in renminbi. On November 30 Trump demanded that the BRICS countries “neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty US Dollar, or…face 100% Tariffs.”
I had come to Brazil in part to conduct research for a book about the future of farming. In recent decades Brazil has gone from a buyer of food to one of the world’s biggest agricultural exporters. The sector makes up a quarter of its GDP, and each year the development of more resilient and productive crop varieties by Embrapa, the country’s research agency, and a mighty flow of domestic and foreign investment has expanded the “agricultural frontier,” an arc of cultivation and animal husbandry that has been advancing northward and westward since the days of Portuguese rule.
Everywhere I went, from sustainable farms in the states of Paraná, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais to the ranches of Mato Grosso and the soybean megafarms of Bahia, vast expanses of charred undergrowth were reminders of the wildfires that struck the country with exceptional severity last year. Outside Cáceres, a cattle town in Mato Grosso, I spent an afternoon with Miguel Leao, who told me that his Nelore cows had fallen ill after drinking rainwater that was black with ash. My itinerary didn’t take me to the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where 181 people lost their lives to flooding in April and May and the cost to farmers was estimated at $2 billion.
Lula’s return to power has been good for the Amazon but bad for the Cerrado, a huge area of tropical savanna that occupies much of the east of the country and from which the Amazon draws much of its humidity. According to Global Witness, an NGO that monitors the environment, the rate at which the Brazilian Amazon is being cleared fell by half in 2023, while in the Cerrado the rate of clearance rose by 43 percent. “Without the Cerrado,” Mercedes Bustamante, a biologist at the University of Brasília, told me, “there is no Amazon.” She described the Cerrado as a “sacrificial zone” that a politically weakened Lula has given agribusiness to compensate for reduced opportunities in the Amazon.
According to MapBiomas, which uses satellites to follow changes in land use, the amount of surface water in Brazil has fallen by almost 16 percent since the early 1990s. Aquifers are being drawn down faster than they are being replenished. In 2023 nine hydrologists, statisticians, and forest scientists predicted that at the current rate of forest clearance, by 2050 the Cerrado will have lost 23,653 cubic meters of water per second since 1985, “equivalent to a decrease of 33.9 percent of the river flows.”
Even among the sustainable farmers I met, whom I had expected to sympathize with an environmentally conscious president, I found no one who had anything positive to say about Lula. While Brazil has become rich through farming, Chinese demand and Embrapa’s ingenuity made it happen, not Lula’s affinity for the land. The source of his popularity is elsewhere.
In the industrial city of São Bernardo do Campo, a short distance from the bar where the young Lula used to have a glass or two of cachaça from a bottle put aside for him by the management, I visited the headquarters of the metalworkers’ union that he led in the 1970s and early 1980s. The building is hung with portraits of Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg, and Chico Mendes, an advocate for the rights of indigenous people in the Amazon region who was assassinated by a rancher in 1988, as well as a famous old photo of Lula, cigarette in hand, addressing a stadium full of striking workers. The union’s current president, Moisés Selerges, told Le Monde recently that São Bernardo and its neighborhood are “holy ground for the working class.”
When Lula was starting out, industrial activity accounted for 48 percent of the country’s GDP, and 30 percent of the workforce was unionized. These figures are now 23 percent and 12 percent, respectively. In 1985 there were 216,000 metalworkers in and around São Bernardo. There are now 96,000. Each morning the Volkswagen factory there opens its doors to 8,200 workers, down from a peak of 43,000. The traditional working class is disappearing.
The gig economy that is replacing it relies on technology that Lula doesn’t use. He doesn’t have a smartphone, and his social media is handled by others. His discomfort at this new world was evident in the speech he delivered on his release from jail in 2019, when he lamented that “people…have no jobs, people work for Uber or delivering pizzas on a bike.”
According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, in 2022 there were at least 1.5 million gig economy workers operating through apps. Uber boasts at least half a million drivers and 30 million customers in Brazil. It has generated a new word, uberização, which denotes the advance of the informal economy, with its claims of autonomy, flexibility, and entrepreneurship, and the disappearance of millions of formal jobs. Gig economy workers were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Pablo Marçal, who almost advanced to the runoff for mayor of South America’s richest and most populous city. If you want to see the future of the far right after Bolsonaro, look no further than Marçal. In an opinion poll on support for the 2026 presidential candidates he came in second, behind Lula and ahead of Tarcísio de Freitas, Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister and the current governor of the state of São Paolo, who is considered a more orthodox right-winger.
The thirty-seven-year-old Marçal, who started his career working in a call center, claims to have amassed a $30 million fortune as a “multi-entrepreneur of a multibillion-dollar conglomerate, covering 19 sectors.” His message of physical fitness, self-reliance, and piety attracted many Paulistas who associate the left with benefits dependency, sexual license, and efforts to hold up national development by raising spurious concerns about deforestation and climate change. His policy proposals included tripling the number of police, building the world’s tallest building, linking the favelas by cable car, and sending communists to Venezuela.
In 2010 Marçal was sentenced to four years in prison for being part of a cyber gang that robbed banks. He avoided jail because his appeal outlasted the statute of limitations. During the mayoral campaign he accused Tabata Amaral—whom he considered disqualified from office because she is unmarried and childless—of precipitating her father’s suicide. The head of the small political party of which Marçal is a member boasted of his involvement in securing the release from jail of one of the leaders of Brazil’s biggest crime organization, the Primeiro Comando da Capital. In a TV debate in September, Marçal provoked one of the candidates, José Luiz Datena, a TV host whose program, Brasil Urgente, specializes in police raids, gangland vendettas, and helicopter chases, into attacking him with a stool.
Controversy turned Marçal into a national celebrity. In the first round of the São Paulo municipal elections on October 6, he won 28.14 percent of the vote, just shy of Boulos’s 29.07 percent and Nunes’s 29.48 percent. Boulos, who had been touted as a possible heir to Lula, and whom I followed as he campaigned in a São Paulo favela so prone to landslides that it had to be stabilized by being partly covered in concrete, lost the runoff largely because of his prominent involvement in the Movement for Homeless Workers, which organizes mass invasions of unoccupied real estate. Several Paulistas assured me that Boulos intended to abolish private property—a fallacy spread on social media.
Bolsonaro avoided either endorsing or rejecting Marçal, a younger, more technologically adept version of himself, and by the time I met the former president, a few days before the runoff, Marçal was out of the race. The occasion was a fundraiser for Nunes at a faux farmhouse in urban São Paulo. Wearing a blue shirt and his biggest, most infantile smile, Bolsonaro threaded a path through the businessmen and their wives, reaching down to snaffle a bit of sausage here, a morsel of picanha there. (He eats messily, on the move.) As he settled into the car to be driven away I extended my hand through the open door and requested an interview on behalf of The New York Review. For a moment he looked at me coldly, then the door began to close, and I withdrew my hand from his.
That evening, on a brightly lit stage in an evangelical church, Nunes knelt while the pastor blessed his campaign to retain the mayoralty. Bolsonaro and Tarcísio de Freitas looked on. To the accompaniment of a single, shimmering organ chord, Tarcísio, as he is known, intoned, “God sent confusion to his enemies, and do you know why? Because this project is blessed.” The swaying congregation, black people, white people, brown and yellow people, the whole range of Brazilian shades, answered, “Amen” and “Praise!”
In the 1970s Brazil was 5 percent Protestant and 91 percent Catholic. Those percentages are now roughly 31 and 50, respectively. According to a study published by the University of São Paulo, between 1970 and 2019 the number of evangelical places of worship in the country rose from just over 1,000 to 109,000. By the mid-2030s the world’s biggest Catholic country will have a Protestant majority.
One Sunday I visited the world headquarters of the Pentecostal Church of Deus é Amor—God Is Love—in a formerly industrial part of São Paulo. I was greeted by a young woman named Priscilla who led me into a well-appointed auditorium where around thirty musicians and singers in their teens and twenties were rehearsing rock numbers for the evening service. Then I accompanied her downstairs to a much larger auditorium that is used on special occasions when the church’s members gather from around the country. “Imagine,” she said, smiling rapturously, “20,000 people all praising God!” I asked how the church financed itself, and she replied, “Worshipers are encouraged to donate 10 percent of their income but are told never to give more than they can afford.”
The founder of Deus é Amor, David Martins Miranda, was a mechanic and clerk from the southern state of Paraná. “When he started out in the early 1960s,” his thirty-four-year-old grandson, David Miranda Neto, told me as worshipers filed in for the evening service, “he would buy fifteen-minute radio slots to get his message across. Now we have 12,000 churches in Brazil and we’re present in eighty countries. We have two thousand churches in Peru.” Then, taking up a microphone, he bounded onstage and asked his youthful congregation, “What would you do if you saw Jesus here, right now? Well, he is here!”
In the 2000s evangelical leaders supported Lula, who gave them tax breaks in return. The Lava Jato investigations exposed the corruption of Workers’ Party rule, and influential pastors accused the left of trying to destroy the traditional family by encouraging homosexuality—same-sex marriage was legalized in 2013—and abortion. In 2016, Bolsonaro was baptized in the River Jordan by a Brazilian pastor, and since then the alliance between evangelicalism and the far right, with agribusiness in a supporting role, has been the most potent force in Brazilian politics. While campaigning for her husband in the 2022 election, Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, a fervent evangelical, warned that the country was engaged in “a struggle with evil, against Satan who wishes to destroy our nation.”
The evangelicals preach a “theology of prosperity,” which claims that God wants us to be rich. They also intervene when the state fails. Miranda Neto told me that Deus é Amor provides food and washing facilities for the poor. In Cáceres I visited a small evangelical church with a fenced-off yard where girls were happily playing football, shielded from the war that was being waged in the streets outside by the Primeiro Comando da Capital and its rival Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, for control of the cocaine trade. While following Boulos’s campaign in the São Paulo favela I was told that the shacks that serve as evangelical churches are bulwarks against the violent crime that Brazilians consistently say is the issue that matters to them most.
On a street corner in São Bernardo, Diego had put a hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting into a car that had slowed to pick us up and that I wrongly assumed to be the Uber I had ordered. As it sped off, he said, “You just avoided being kidnapped.” According to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, in the year ending in July 2024 reported cases of rape rose by 6.5 percent over the previous year, reaching a historic high of 83,988. In November a female Uber driver in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso, told me that three other female Uber drivers working in the same city had been raped in recent days and that earlier this year a serial killer had tortured and killed several Uber drivers, both men and women. In the fitness and self-defense classes that have proliferated in recent years, Brazilians work their triceps and learn how to disable assailants. One female university teacher, who has been the subject of intermittent harassment by a stalker for the past seven years and recently used her self-defense skills against an attacker in the street, laconically told me, “If the worst comes to the worst, you bite his jugular, and it’s game over.”
There is rarely a political downside to being tough on crime. This was understood by Bolsonaro, who said that criminals should die in the streets “like cockroaches,” and by Moraes, who as federal minister of justice in the middle of the last decade traveled to Paraguay, where he was filmed slashing at fields of cannabis with a machete. Brazil’s latest hard-line crime fighter is Tarcísio, who has some 100,000 military policemen at his disposal and isn’t afraid to use them.
Between January and September 2024 the São Paulo military police killed 496 people, an increase of 75 percent over the same period last year. On November 3 a man was shot in the back by police after stealing detergent. Two days later a four-year-old playing in the street was shot and killed by police in a cross fire. On December 2 a policeman was filmed throwing a suspect to his death off a bridge. When Tarcísio was asked about complaints that NGOs had lodged with the United Nations over a military police operation in which thirty-eight died, he replied, “I don’t care.”
As Lilia Schwarcz, of the University of São Paulo, and Heloísa Starling, of the University of Minas Gerais, show in their book Brazil: A Biography,* the lands that now constitute the Republic of Brazil have, with their bloodstained colonial past and still largely unexpiated experience of slavery, rarely been less than exceptionally violent. What Bolsonaro and his allies have done is to inject this violence into the public discourse, with consequences that will endure.
On December 9, Lula was flown from Brasília to São Paulo for emergency surgery to stop bleeding on his brain precipitated by his fall in the shower in October. For a few days Brazilians feared the worst, and there was much sympathy for a president who, despite the strong feelings his record inspires, continues to personify his country’s informality, affability, and warmth. As soon as Lula was up and about there was a collective sigh of relief, and Brazilians started talking about the possibility that he may not be able to run in 2026 and the lack of any obvious replacement for him in the ranks of the left. And that is the trouble with Lula. He is irreplaceable. .
—January 30, 2025
This Issue
February 27, 2025
Never Again and Again
The Prophet Business
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*
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018; reviewed in these pages by Larry Rohter, December 6, 2018. ↩