During a recent roundtable discussion, a group of university professors and graduate students addressed the challenges facing the country as it prepares for the Oct. 2 presidential election.
Brazil will vote to elect a new president on October 2. Whoever ends up in the presidency inherits a host of challenges: high inflation, rising unemployment and extreme polarization of the electorate.
The two main contenders are Jair Bolsonaro, the current president, and former president Luis Inácio da Silva.
Bolsonaro is a right-wing former military officer who came to power in 2019. Although he tackled a failing economy early in his term, Bolsonaro is seen as a strongman who has stripped back environmental protections and put danger to indigenous people in the Amazon and throughout the country.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the plague, avoiding wearing a mask. Many blame it for the increase in infections and deaths. Brazil had more than 680,000 deaths from COVID-19, second only to the United States.
Da Silva, who leads the polls, is a member of the Workers’ Party and was president from 2003 to 2010. He enjoyed huge popularity during his time in office, in part because of a commodity boom that pushed the country into several years of prosperity and social policies that helped many people move into the middle class.
Although imprisoned for 580 days on charges of money laundering and corruption, in 2019 the Federal Supreme Court acquitted da Silva of all charges and he was released from prison.
On September 7, the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence, several university professors and graduate students from the Michelle Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures held a conference called “What’s at stake in Brazil’s presidential election?”
The presenters all agreed that Bolsonaro’s administration has been marked by an increase in the destruction of indigenous areas and total disregard for indigenous peoples, a tremendous increase in the deforestation of Amazonian lands for use as cattle ranches and soy farms, and a visible persecution of members of the LGBTQ community.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil have been marginalized and discriminated against for decades. In 1988 alone, more than 300 indigenous peoples won the constitutional right to be Brazilian and indigenous, said Tracy Devine Guzmán, associate professor of Latin American Studies and co-coordinator of Native American and Global Indigenous Studies.
“Prior to that time, indigenous peoples shared the status of minors and the mentally incompetent,” said Devine Guzmán. Although they have retained the constitutional right of differentiated citizenship, including territorial rights, more than three decades ago, their lands have been under constant threat.
“The current administration has promoted a harsh political discourse that actually ends up pitting the well-being of indigenous peoples against that of their countrymen, especially the non-indigenous poor,” said Devine Guzmán. “This message is divisive. It is dangerous and suggests that the occupation of indigenous lands is somehow a matter of benevolence rather than a constitutional right.”
According to Devine Guzmán, the state has once again become a perpetrator of violence against indigenous people, against their lands and against the lawyers who work on their behalf.
Indeed, the Brazilian government has aggressively eroded environmental protections for lands in the Amazon, resulting in an “environmental disaster,” according to doctoral student Sam Johnson, Ph.D. candidate in Literary, Cultural and Linguistic Studies who presented on the impact of extraction over the past several years.
Since Bolsonaro took office, the government has allowed and encouraged the continued expansion of mining and agribusiness on designated, protected indigenous lands. Many of the wildfires that broke out in the Amazon in 2019 were human-caused, intended to clear land for mining and other uses, Johnson said. The loss of primary forests in the Amazon region has increased drastically since the current administration took office, he said.
“All these events point to the extractive agenda of the current government and what is really at stake in the next election,” Johnson noted.
Brazil is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women, said Steve Butterman, associate professor and director of the Portuguese program in the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, who presented “Femicide, Impunity and Misogyny.”
Brazil is the world’s number one perpetrator of LGBTQ+ murders and femicides, according to Butterman. “Violence against women is at an all-time high in the country,” he said.
“Even after passing the Femicide Act (a 2015 legislation that recognizes that women are killed because of their gender), Brazil fails to identify and punish gender-based killings,” explained Butterman. According to the Brazilian Public Security Forum, four girls younger than 13 are raped every hour in the country, he noted.
Every minute in 2021, Brazilian police received an average of one report of intimate partner violence. However, the vast majority of these reports have fallen on deaf ears, he said.
Butterman said he continues to serve as an expert witness in dozens of asylum cases involving members of the Brazilian LGBTQ community. It also helps survivors of severe domestic violence who seek asylum in the United States because they face prejudice and persecution.
Participants in the meeting agreed that Brazil’s challenges will not end if a leftist president is elected. But many said they feel hopeful that existing legislation that protects many marginalized groups will have a better chance of being enforced if Bolsonaro loses.
Gabriel Das Chagas, a doctoral student in Literary, Cultural and Linguistic Studies, spoke about Brazil’s history of colonialism and institutionalized racism, stating that if daDilva won: “At least we would have a president who believes in and respects the Constitution “.
