WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:270000 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.540 There's no question that Brazilian democracy is imperilled. 00:00:02.540 --> 00:00:05.740 You can't really overstate how dangerous the political climate is 00:00:05.740 --> 00:00:08.960 when you have a president who has explicitly said for decades 00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:11.920 that he opposes the very concept of democracy, 00:00:11.920 --> 00:00:15.740 whose family have threatened repeatedly since he's been elected 00:00:15.740 --> 00:00:18.840 to do things like shut the Congress shut down the Supreme Court 00:00:18.840 --> 00:00:21.020 so the risk to democracy is very real. 00:00:21.020 --> 00:00:23.460 It's not just the President it's his three sons as well, 00:00:23.460 --> 00:00:26.160 one of whom is a Senator, the other of whom is a member of Congress, 00:00:26.160 --> 00:00:28.740 who's kind of the liaison to the international far right, 00:00:28.740 --> 00:00:32.460 his other son who's technically a city councilman in Rio de Janeiro 00:00:32.460 --> 00:00:35.900 but is actually the mastermind of the fake news network that the Bolsonaro's run. 00:00:35.900 --> 00:00:41.240 They are all deeply enmeshed - not just in corruption, taking bribes and stuff - 00:00:41.240 --> 00:00:45.540 they're closely linked to the paramilitary gangs that rule Brazil 00:00:45.540 --> 00:00:47.160 that are incredibly savage and barbaric, 00:00:47.160 --> 00:00:51.740 they're composed of ex or even current members of the military, the armed forces and police. 00:00:51.740 --> 00:00:56.320 They are like the Mafia but far more barbaric, they carry out murders for hire, 00:00:56.320 --> 00:01:00.900 they use and exploit their military prowess to carry out crimes without getting caught 00:01:00.900 --> 00:01:04.920 They have connections to the police and the military that shield them when they do. 00:01:04.920 --> 00:01:09.760 It's a really menacing operation that the Bolsonaro's are very closely linked to 00:01:09.760 --> 00:01:13.480 and there's a lot of scandals that can threaten to put President Bolsonaro's sons 00:01:13.480 --> 00:01:15.260 and ultimately himself in prison 00:01:15.260 --> 00:01:17.860 and a lot of the political strife and conflict in Brazil 00:01:17.860 --> 00:01:21.400 comes from this attempt by Bolsonaro to protect his family 00:01:21.400 --> 00:01:23.520 from the mechanisms of law enforcement. 00:01:23.520 --> 00:01:27.340 When you have that kind of an ethos driving all of this 00:01:27.340 --> 00:01:33.560 namely this very autocratic President driven by the incentive to keep his sons out of jail 00:01:33.560 --> 00:01:36.160 it is a very volatile situation to put that mildly. 00:01:39.200 --> 00:01:42.320 You know it's not just me as a journalist covering Brazil 00:01:42.320 --> 00:01:45.320 and having done an exposé all through last year 00:01:45.320 --> 00:01:47.640 that was very destabilising to the Bolsonaro government 00:01:47.640 --> 00:01:49.800 showing corruption by what was at the time 00:01:49.800 --> 00:01:52.880 his most important minister the Justice Minister Sérgio Moro 00:01:52.880 --> 00:01:55.940 but also the fact that my husband is himself a left-wing politician 00:01:55.940 --> 00:01:58.480 he's member of Congress from the Socialist Party, 00:01:58.480 --> 00:02:02.160 one of only two of 600 members of Congress who are openly gay 00:02:02.160 --> 00:02:05.200 when the Bolsonaro movement is vehemently anti-gay. 00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:09.900 It has really put us into kind of a prime target role of the Bolsonaro movement 00:02:09.900 --> 00:02:12.260 when it comes to their fake news network, threats. 00:02:16.480 --> 00:02:19.800 In march of 2018 one of our family's best friends, 00:02:19.800 --> 00:02:23.060 who at the time was my husband's colleague on the Rio de Janeiro city council 00:02:23.060 --> 00:02:24.480 before he was elected to Congress, 00:02:24.480 --> 00:02:28.260 Marielle Franco who's a black LGBT left-wing activist, 00:02:28.260 --> 00:02:31.880 was brutally murdered, assassinated, on the streets of Rio de Janeiro 00:02:31.880 --> 00:02:34.000 after an event while riding in the back of a car, 00:02:34.000 --> 00:02:37.320 carried out by one of those militias closely linked to the Bolsonaros. 00:02:37.320 --> 00:02:41.640 Political violence is a very serious reality in Brazil, it's not just an abstraction 00:02:41.640 --> 00:02:44.260 and because of the work he's done, because of the work that i've done, 00:02:44.260 --> 00:02:47.340 and because the work that we do jointly and kind of the symbol that we've become 00:02:47.340 --> 00:02:50.740 as an openly gay couple with two adopted Brazilian children, 00:02:50.740 --> 00:02:52.960 we've become one of the prime enemies of the Bolsonaro movement, 00:02:52.960 --> 00:02:55.340 that of course carries a lot of danger and a lot of risk with it. 00:02:55.340 --> 00:02:59.000 During the military regime that the US and the UK helped usher in, 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:02.820 when they toppled the democratically elected government of Brazil in 1964 00:03:02.820 --> 00:03:07.640 and then proceeded to rule the country for the next 21 years under a highly repressive regime, 00:03:07.640 --> 00:03:12.620 stealing the Amazon from the indigenous tribes that have lived there for centuries 00:03:12.620 --> 00:03:16.620 and that have sovereign rights over it, was something that was routinely done. 00:03:16.620 --> 00:03:19.740 They would just cut down trees, they would mine, they would log, 00:03:19.740 --> 00:03:24.220 deforestation was epidemic and so Bolsonaro comes out of that tradition: 00:03:24.220 --> 00:03:27.120 He was part of the military regime, he was a young army Captain, 00:03:27.120 --> 00:03:31.220 he spent the last 30 years advocating that as a superior form of government 00:03:31.220 --> 00:03:33.840 and chose as his Environmental Minister 00:03:33.840 --> 00:03:38.400 this completely deranged extremist Ricardo Sallas who ran for Congress, 00:03:38.400 --> 00:03:44.260 his campaign literature showed the Amazon and environmental groups and bullets, 00:03:44.260 --> 00:03:46.879 essentially saying the answer to environmental activism was 00:03:46.879 --> 00:03:49.920 that we're just going to shoot them and then there was a recording that emerged 00:03:49.920 --> 00:03:53.080 recently within the last two months of a cabinet meeting in the Bolsonaro government 00:03:53.080 --> 00:03:54.860 where the Environmental Minister said 00:03:54.860 --> 00:03:59.040 that the focus on the Coronavirus is the perfect opportunity to enable us 00:03:59.040 --> 00:04:02.280 to accelerate Amazon policies that we believe in, 00:04:02.280 --> 00:04:07.000 namely invading indigenous land, killing or allowing to be killed indigenous leaders, 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:11.300 allowing the agribusiness that funded the Bolsonaro campaign in 2018 00:04:11.300 --> 00:04:14.540 full range to run roughshod over the Amazon, 00:04:14.540 --> 00:04:17.900 to burn down trees, to clear lands for cattle, 00:04:17.900 --> 00:04:20.000 essentially just to exploit the Amazon. 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:23.940 Bolsonaro has contempt for the indigenous tribes in brazil, 00:04:23.940 --> 00:04:27.080 he doesn't believe they're entitled to "one centimetre of land" as he put it 00:04:27.080 --> 00:04:29.740 and that the Amazon is there to exploit and not to protect. 00:04:36.660 --> 00:04:38.920 I think there's now a consensus internationally 00:04:38.920 --> 00:04:42.280 that as bad as Donald Trump has been, as bad as Boris Johnson has been, 00:04:42.280 --> 00:04:44.300 Bolsonaro is in a league by himself 00:04:44.300 --> 00:04:47.440 when it comes to having mismanaged the Coronavirus pandemic, 00:04:47.440 --> 00:04:50.880 not only because he mocked it and minimised it and dismissed it early on 00:04:50.880 --> 00:04:54.280 but because he's been opposed on completely non-scientific grounds 00:04:54.280 --> 00:04:58.600 to every form of social distancing, isolation, quarantine, shutdown, 00:04:58.600 --> 00:05:01.100 he's encouraged people to go out into crowds 00:05:01.100 --> 00:05:03.640 he of course himself contracted the virus. 00:05:03.640 --> 00:05:06.780 Brazil has the highest rate of confirmed cases 00:05:06.780 --> 00:05:10.900 as well as the highest death rate of any country in the world except for the United States. 00:05:14.320 --> 00:05:16.880 Obviously there's a right-wing ideological similarity, 00:05:16.880 --> 00:05:21.360 which among other things posits that government really doesn't have much 00:05:21.360 --> 00:05:23.380 of a positive role to play in society 00:05:23.380 --> 00:05:27.120 and also is skeptical of the value of science, 00:05:27.120 --> 00:05:31.320 as we obviously see when it comes to skepticism over climate scenarios. 00:05:31.320 --> 00:05:33.540 So when you combine those two things, 00:05:33.540 --> 00:05:36.840 exactly what is most needed when it comes to managing a pandemic: 00:05:36.840 --> 00:05:40.760 efficient government response plus a belief in science, 00:05:40.760 --> 00:05:43.240 you have an ideology and power in all three countries, 00:05:43.240 --> 00:05:48.400 to varying degrees, that is hostile to exactly the kinds of responses that are most needed 00:05:48.400 --> 00:05:50.200 and therefore it should be unsurprising 00:05:50.200 --> 00:05:53.740 that that ideology is one that has produced the worst results. 00:05:53.740 --> 00:05:57.480 I don't think any of those three leaders care very much about governance, 00:05:57.480 --> 00:05:59.660 they kind of like the political battle, 00:05:59.660 --> 00:06:03.260 not really that interested in the mechanics of government, 00:06:03.260 --> 00:06:04.880 which kind of bore them, and so 00:06:04.880 --> 00:06:09.720 at exactly the moment when you need competent involved engaged leaders 00:06:09.720 --> 00:06:17.759 to inspire and organise and create the space for a coordinated, effective, 00:06:17.759 --> 00:06:21.120 unique novel government response to a novel pathogen, 00:06:21.120 --> 00:06:26.180 the three leaders, who again to varying degrees have very little interest in actual governance, 00:06:26.180 --> 00:06:28.560 seem to have produced among the worst results 00:06:28.560 --> 00:06:30.560 and I don't think that should be particularly surprising. 00:06:33.600 --> 00:06:37.940 Bolsonaro for all of his horrors and all of his failings 00:06:37.940 --> 00:06:41.520 is an effective showman, he's an effective demagogue, 00:06:41.520 --> 00:06:42.960 not dissimilar to Tump. 00:06:42.960 --> 00:06:46.600 Bolsonaro has been kind of on the fringes of Brazilian political life, 00:06:46.600 --> 00:06:49.360 he served for 30 years in the Congress before being elected President. 00:06:49.360 --> 00:06:50.720 He was never taken seriously 00:06:50.720 --> 00:06:52.300 and the way that he rose to prominence 00:06:52.300 --> 00:06:54.740 was he started going on these TV shows, 00:06:54.740 --> 00:06:57.800 he was irresistible to TV because he was so outrageous 00:06:57.800 --> 00:07:02.320 but also so charismatic that TV loved him and they turned him into a star, 00:07:02.320 --> 00:07:07.660 very similar to how the US media with Trump built him into this figure for their own interests 00:07:07.660 --> 00:07:10.020 that ultimately ended up converting to political power 00:07:10.020 --> 00:07:12.220 For all the failings of Bolsonaro 00:07:12.220 --> 00:07:17.260 when you take a population that is very marginalised and deprived 00:07:17.260 --> 00:07:21.800 and that is susceptible to a very advanced and sophisticated 00:07:21.800 --> 00:07:24.120 and well-financed fake news operation 00:07:24.120 --> 00:07:26.680 and you add to that an effective political demagogue, 00:07:26.680 --> 00:07:30.040 it's very difficult to predict Bolsonaro's political demise. 00:07:30.040 --> 00:07:35.039 Even with the Coronavirus as it kind of ravages poor communities and the economy 00:07:35.040 --> 00:07:37.820 he's kind of turning it into an advantage by saying: 00:07:37.820 --> 00:07:43.380 "I told you all along that we can't shut down the economy because if we do you're gonna suffer." 00:07:43.380 --> 00:07:46.360 He's very adept, very kind of politically agile 00:07:46.360 --> 00:07:49.340 and you know the elite is always surprised by public opinion polls 00:07:49.340 --> 00:07:52.380 that show him more or less maintaining his core base, 00:07:52.380 --> 00:07:55.640 kind of like in the UK all the sophisticates in Oxbridge, 00:07:55.640 --> 00:07:59.340 kept hearing about how terrible Brexit was so they were shocked when it passed, 00:07:59.340 --> 00:08:01.540 same within the US when Trump beat Hillary 00:08:01.540 --> 00:08:07.240 there's a kind of detachment in the elite class from the population that they scorn 00:08:07.240 --> 00:08:10.020 and so I think it's very difficult to predict 00:08:10.020 --> 00:08:16.120 how that detachment will translate into political outcomes. 00:08:16.720 --> 00:08:21.260 I really encourage you to support on Patreon, Double Down News. 00:08:21.260 --> 00:08:25.640 Independent journalism has never been as important as it is now. 00:08:25.640 --> 00:08:29.759 Double Down News is devoted to challenging power, 00:08:29.760 --> 00:08:33.400 to questioning pieties without fear, without constraints 00:08:33.400 --> 00:08:37.760 and that's the kind of addition we need more than ever to our discourse 00:08:37.760 --> 00:08:43.200 and independent journalism is possible only with your support.