In spirit and intent, CADE’s investigation into Google is similar to legislation in Australia that recognized that value is being extracted from news publishers without proportionate recompense. In Brazil, the case has been debated since 2019, but the adoption of AI Overviews helped alter the perspective of Brazilian judges. The overviews are artificially generated summaries that synthesize information from several sources and appear at the top of Google Search results. They “raise potentially more concerns,” ruled Judge Camila Cabral Pires Alves, “as they may more profoundly alter the economic function of the interface and expand the ability to retain attention within the platform's own environment.”

CADE will now investigate whether Google should be sanctioned for “alleged abusive exploitation of a dominant position, in light of the technological evolution of the conduct.” While there is perhaps a greater global appetite to regulate the impacts of AI – even the Trump administration has recently acknowledged that some oversight may be necessary – the CADE judges have been under considerable pressure from Big Tech executives to stop investigations into how their control of the market harms Brazilian businesses. 

For those of us who have reported on Big Tech, this aggressive lobbying is not surprising. Companies like Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Amazon, and Microsoft have long attempted to interfere in any decision or legislation that can harm their interests in Latin America. According to a joint investigation by journalists across 13 countries, Big Tech lobbyists got away with convincing legislators in Colombia to weaken a rule meant to protect children’s mental health and prevent enforcement of privacy regulations in Ecuador. It took a team of over 40 journalists from 13 countries to uncover this while reporting on the ‘Big Tech Lobby’ in the continent and across the world.   

Threats by the U.S. government to retaliate against any country or international entity that sought to regulate Big Tech added another layer to an already complicated and uneven relationship with Silicon Valley. “Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology,” wrote Donald Trump on social media. “Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or consider the consequences!” During the past year, Trump’s envoys have forced dozens of governments around the world to dilute or even shelve regulation in exchange for lifting tariffs. 

In “Big Tech’s Invisible Hands,” which I coordinated alongside Maria Teresa Ronderos, from CLIP (Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodistica), journalists mapped a total of 75 executives that were part of “public policy” or “government relations” teams in Brazil. Tech companies utilized a “revolving door” in which public sector employees could go straight into highly paid jobs leveraging their contacts and influence. Doors opened more easily. Invitations to hangouts and events were more likely to be accepted. 

Lobbying in Brazil is dialed up to eleven. The country has 163 million internet users, with over 150 million on WhatsApp, and over 120 million on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. With AI, Brazil is a similarly large, influential market. Portuguese is the sixth most widely-spoken language in the world, with 70% of speakers based in Brazil. Which means that, if an LLM has been trained in this language, it probably used content created by millions of Brazilians going about their business of making friends, debating politics and football online. It’s not just about journalists; we are all unpaid labor for Big Tech. 

In the words of Arthur Lira, the Speaker in Brazil’s Congress who filed a criminal complaint against Big Tech executives in 2023, companies adopted a variety of tactics “to shut down democratic debate and intimidate lawmakers” and defeat any attempt at using legislation to force accountability. Google, he said, used its search homepage, used by over 85% of Brazilians, to spread fear that proposed laws would “make the internet worse” or “make it harder to know what is true or false on the internet.” A report by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that Google invested in ads on its own platform so extensively that it tweaked the search, prominently featuring the word “censorship” in connection to the Brazilian bill. Google also hired Michael Temer, a lawyer and former President of Brazil, to influence lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices. Of course, it was not Google alone. Meta executives, for instance, even argued that proposed legislation in Brazil could lead to the Bible being censored.

But Brazilian lawmakers, the Supreme Court, and civil society have persisted. On August 28, 2025, the “Felca Law” was approved, after a video by the influencer Felca denounced the exploitation and exposure of children on social media. The law establishes that digital platforms must take measures like verifying user age, implementing parental controls, and preventing children's exposure to adult content, gambling, and pornography. They must create reporting channels and may face fines of up to 10% of their annual revenue in Brazil.

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Donald Trump have had a testy relationship, in part because of Lula’s criticism of Big Tech. In February, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Lula called for global governance of AI, warning: “When few control the algorithms, it is not innovation, but domination. Regulating the so-called Big Tech companies is linked to the imperative of safeguarding human rights in the digital sphere, promoting information integrity, and protecting our countries’ creative industries.”

By sticking to his guns, Lula may now be seeing the tide turn. He was in the White House on May 7, and though neither he nor Trump took questions, both appeared encouraged by the meeting. “Very dynamic,” was how Trump described Lula, while Lula said he was “very, very satisfied” with how the talks went. With a general election in Brazil approaching in October, Lula will be sensitive to how the White House, as it has done in other elections, and Big Tech might offer vocal support for right wing candidates.

But his willingness to stand up to Big Tech is popular with voters. A recent poll found that 78% of Brazilians want to see tech companies being held responsible for the content they publish. Another poll found that 55% of Brazilians defend regulating Big Tech, with 43.9% against it. 

And as scams, fake news, and AI slop dominate ever larger swathes of all our digital space, in Brazil, as in much of the rest of the world, the entire experience of the internet is becoming more unappealing. Big Tech, with the assistance of the U.S. government, may be succeeding in slowing down the pace of regulation and watering down the content of that regulation, but in the long run its victories might be pyrrhic. People have had enough and their governments might be forced to listen.

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In the months leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which, in a close runoff, Lula da Silva from the leftist Worker’s Party defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social networks were flooded with disinformation, calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and Bolsonaro’s insistence that the elections would be rigged. 

On January 8, a week after Lula began his third term as Brazil’s president, followers of Bolsonaro took the country’s capital by storm. Frustrated right-wing radicals armed with weapons, flags, mobile phones and conspiracy theories occupied and destroyed the three pillars of the federal government in Brasília: the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. They not only left a trail of destruction but also stole documents and hard drives, and destroyed artworks and infrastructure. 

“There was no surprise at all, they [right-wing radicals] followed the extreme-right playbook, step by step. They are just pawns in a bigger game,” said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far-right. According to Prado, people who stormed the capital were “domestic terrorists” moved by conspiracy theories that reject liberal democracy and its institutions. The researcher added that the group views violence as a legitimate response to what it wrongly perceives as a fraudulent election. Prado also called attention to how people were proud to take part in the invasion, boasting of their presence on social media and inviting others to join. “It raises their in-group status,” she said. “The more they perform on social media, the higher their ‘score’ before their peers, the more radicalized they become.”

Bolsonaro has always welcomed and incentivized radicalization. His so-called “Office of Hate” — a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus known for attacking government opponents and journalists — and his supporters have a long record of spreading hate speech, fake news and disinformation online. But since he lost his re-election bid in a highly-anticipated runoff vote, tensions and accusations have taken on a tone of all-out denialism. This narrative has dominated B-38, a pro-Bolsonaro Telegram channel with military roots and more than 60,000 members. On the night Bolsonaro lost the runoff, before the results were even announced, a member of B-38 claimed that the Brazil Supreme Court's vote-counting "algorithm" — no such thing exists — was stealing votes from Bolsonaro and giving them to Lula. An avalanche of baseless rumors about election fraud followed.

Refusing to accept defeat, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and camped out in front of the quarters of the Brazilian Armed Forces, calling for a military intervention. All of these efforts were orchestrated online. By the end of November, paid ads on Facebook and Instagram called for a military coup, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the elections. Despite this going against Meta's content policies, Agência Pública, a Brazilian investigative journalism outlet, found that the ads were viewed more than 400,000 times. In December, lawmakers aligned with Bolsonaro began taking to the floor of Brazil’s Congress to call for a military coup and generate online engagement. These calls were broadcast on TV Senado, Brazil’s version of C-SPAN, and were viewed by more than two million people. 

Bolsonaro’s international allies were also quick to respond to his defeat. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former strategist, had warned of a “stolen election” in the lead-up to polling day and promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring across his social media channels. On the day of the invasion of Brasília, Bannon applauded the insurrectionists, calling them “freedom fighters,” even as Bolsonaro himself was keeping a low profile. Bannon’s strategy worked. Some rioters were photographed holding up a banner demanding (in both English and Portuguese) the “source code” of the elections, a reference to the technology behind voting machines that right-wing figures like Bannon and Trump have accused of swinging the election.

Right-wing radicals and their puppeteers baptized the invasion as “Festa da Selma,” or, in English, “Selma’s Party.” The #FestadaSelma hashtag saw plenty of action on Twitter, where users tracked its popularity in southern Brazil and Miami, Florida. According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk recently fired nearly all of the company’s staff in Brazil, except for a few salespeople, leaving the country of 217 million people with virtually no staff dedicated to  moderating content that incites violence in Brazil.  

The term “Festa da Selma” began popping up on social media on January 5. It is a word play on “Festa da Selva,” which is a military war cry: organizers substituted the “v” for an “m,” perhaps in hopes of avoiding detection by Brazilian authorities or even by social media platforms. “A very common practice of [right-wing radicals] is to talk things over through codes, under the radar. They use codenames and words with modified spelling,” said Leonardo Nascimento, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a researcher at the Internet Lab, which monitors more than 500 extreme-right Telegram groups. Nascimento explained that on mainstream platforms, far-right individuals are more careful about the content they post and promote because they fear being banned. But the same caution does not apply to  “low-moderation” platforms. The researcher said that Telegram’s architecture, built on groups and the diffusion of messages, makes it a relative safe haven for extremism.

Telegram took on a key role in Brazilian elections in 2021, when Bolsonaro’s more prominent family members created profiles and began to direct traffic from their other social networks to Telegram. “But the platform is just a vessel. The real center of disinformation isn’t Telegram itself, it’s YouTube and YouTube videos that circulate on Telegram,” said Nascimento. And then the safe haven was forced to dissolve, at least in part. In 2022, in anticipation of the highly contested elections ahead, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the company to shut down select Telegram groups and remove election-related disinformation they had distributed. The aforementioned B-38 group was temporarily suspended shortly thereafter, presumably due to this decision.

The move made Bolsonaro and his supporters turn to other platforms in the far-right online ecosystem such as Gettr, Parler and CloudHub, but also to more ephemeral and privacy-intensive applications like Zello and Signal. Still, according to Nascimento, four days before “Selma’s Party,” Telegram messages were circulating among extreme-right groups advising followers on what to bring to demonstrations, how to behave on arrival and how to withstand tear gas. They also posted information about caravans and buses heading for Brasília. 

“They [rioters] wanted to make it look spontaneous so people would believe [Selma’s Party] was a movement that worked on a certain degree of legitimacy, of popular demand,” said Viktor Chagas, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro state who researches online far-right movements. Chagas contends that Brazil’s extreme-right is now in deep dispute over the identity of Bolsonarism. “The Bolsonaro supporters are losing cohesion. We have the ultraliberals, the monarchists, the gun owners, the neo-Pentecostals and other subgroups going from a process of high centralization in the figure of Bolsonaro to a high level of fragmentation with his defeat,” explained Chagas. “We now have a network that is much more dispersed and much more difficult to monitor.”

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A recent national survey on hunger in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit Brazil hard, found more than half of the country’s population, 125.2 million people, experienced some degree of food insecurity, with more than 33 million people going hungry.

Three times as many Brazilians faced hunger in 2022 than in 2013, a return to the kind of widespread hardship that had long characterized life for many in Brazil.

The survey had found that nearly half of families experiencing severe food insecurity live in the country’s low-income northern and northeastern regions, and 65% of homes headed by a person of African descent have had to restrict their food intake. Nearly one in five households headed by women have gone hungry, primarily due to wage disparities; while families with children are worse off than those without.

The survey helped fuel an expectation that Bolsonaro’s chances in the October 2 general elections were poor. Polls showed former president Lula da Silva potentially winning the election outright, with Bolsonaro carrying just 33% of the electorate. The same polls showed that among families with household incomes of about $450, Lula registered 54% against Bolsonaro’s 26% with a two-point margin of error.

The polls were wrong. Bolsonaro’s conservative values and tough-on-crime discourse found traction, while the issue of hunger has been largely absent from election campaigning. The failure of Bolsonaro’s agricultural policy and social programs to slow the rise of hunger in Brazil hasn’t weakened support for his reelection even among the electorate made food insecure during his presidency — a remarkable reflection of contemporary right-wing populism and the power of social media messaging.

Bolsonaro often attacks low-income Brazilians as lazy or criminal. In 2012, he said northeasterners didn’t want to work because they would stop receiving their dues from the government’s income-transfer program, the Bolsa Família. The social welfare program was among Lula’s most celebrated initiatives and played a major part in reducing Brazilian poverty during his first term in office almost 20 years ago. Bolsonaro replaced Bolsa Familia in 2021 with his own program, the Auxílio Brasil.

As recently as September, Bolsonaro had said that government handouts had prevented low-income people from learning professional skills and that they had been “habituated over the years to not worrying” about how to support themselves. And in a rancorous debate with Lula on October 16, Bolsonaro implied that residents of favelas are criminals.

Meanwhile, his policies have exacerbated hunger. On his first day in office, Bolsonaro axed seven government ministries and eliminated the National Council on Food and Nutritional Security, which served as the nodal point for hundreds of state and local councils. “You eliminate the head and you cut all the space for discussion,” said Vera Villela, President of São Paulo’s Municipal Council on Food and Nutritional Security.

A system of food stocking that ensures supplies for public facilities like schools and hospitals shrank from 349 warehouses in 1991 to 92 last year, and the Bolsonaro government announced it will close 27 more. Meanwhile, the government supports export-focused production making Brazil one of the world’s leading exporters of commodities like soybeans and beef.

And yet Bolsonaro remains electable in large part with the help of this demographic that he so frequently scorns. Brian Winter, the Editor of Americas Quarterly, says Bolsonaro has wooed the country’s evangelical leaders, benefiting from waves of disinformation on social media and messaging platforms and calculated financial support to the poor and to truckers, in his attempts to sway voters to his side. The sheer complexity of the Brazilian electorate helps explain why growing poverty and hunger haven’t had the impact on voters that Bolsonaro’s opponents might have expected.

Doraci and Jurandir live in the Northeast. They moved in together as teenagers and had a roof over their heads but little else. “We didn’t even have bedsheets,” says Doraci Anunciada de Oliveira Silva, now 39 years old. “The ants would bite the baby as he slept on the floor.”

The couple met in 1999 when Jurandir, then 19 and three years older than Doraci, was hired to build a fence around her parents’ property. “He asked if I wanted to date him, and I almost said no,” Doraci recalls. “But he was so nervous and trembling in his agony, that I decided to give him a chance.”

They live in Alto do Rosario, a community of about 500 people in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil’s semi-arid region. The bumpy red dirt road leading to the settlement rises and dips over hills, winding between scraggly trees and fences made from knobby, barkless branches and barbed wire.

Despite the material hardships they faced early in their relationship, Doraci and Jurandir have managed to build a small farm that not only provides for their needs but also enables them to sell products like cheese and butter at a pair of local markets.

Their good fortune stands in stark contrast with millions of other Brazilians, particularly in rural areas and in the country’s northern and northeastern regions.

But Doraci and Jurandir had no access to running water for years. Every day, Doraci would carry an empty jug over a mile to a watering hole where she would fill it and carry it back on her head. “I suffered a lot,” she says of the hard daily work of tending to animals, carrying water, and looking after the crops.

In 2004, during Lula’s first term as president, Doraci and Jurandir received a government grant to build a cistern. The simple structure has transformed their lives. It saves Doraci hours of work every day and also ensures that the family farm has a supply of water for the animals, plants and people.

During the pandemic, the Bolsonaro administration funded an emergency cash transfer program to try to guarantee that Brazil’s most vulnerable would be able to eat. As the election runoff comes closer though, critics alleged that the cash transfers amount to bribes. The Northeast has the largest number of emergency cash recipients — 9.75 million. A constitutional amendment in July allowed the cash transfers to continue after the height of the pandemic — and to increase. Yet Bolsonaro’s government has cut funding to programs such as the one that enabled Doraci and Jurandir to build their cistern and transform their family finances.

In 2008, they put a deposit of 500 Brazilian reals (at the time about $250) down on a second home one lot over from their own. Eight years ago, when Doraci was pregnant with their third child, she used a subsidy offered to low-income pregnant women to invest in a milk cow to produce cheese and two kinds of butter that she and Jurandir sell in local farmers’ markets. For years, Jurandir worked as a delivery driver in the nearby city of Surubim, giving them a cash income in addition to the foodstuffs they produce on the farm. 

A 2009 law, passed when Lula was president, requires state and local governments to spend 30% of their budget for school lunches and snacks on foodstuffs produced by family farms. Schools closed during the pandemic, and so did the spending. When most of Brazil’s states halted their purchases of family-farm products in 2020, it left farmers without a market for their crops. The state of Rio Grande do Norte may be the only one to have opted for a different approach: it expanded the role of family-farm produce. That state is now the most food-secure state in the northeast, and the fourth best ranked state in the country.

“The government of Rio Grande do Norte implemented an integrated policy involving several state agencies to combat hunger during the pandemic,” said Alexandre de Oliveira Lima. Lima runs the state’s rural development and agricultural program. “Here in Rio Grande do Norte, we had a big expansion,” he says, “a really big expansion of family farms” during the pandemic.

Beautifully shot and edited agriculture commercials fill ad breaks on Brazilian television. “Agro é top,” goes the slogan. Agro is the best. The ads reflect the deep political power wielded by Brazil’s agribusiness industry and the rural caucus in the Brazilian legislature.

Almost half of Brazil’s total exports in 2021, $120 billion, came from agriculture and livestock farming, a 20% increase over 2020 according to reporting by the Brazilian magazine Piauí. More than a quarter of Brazil’s GDP is attributed to agribusiness, although this figure includes ancillary activities like the sale of veterinary medicines.

“Agribusiness acts like a vacuum for resources that concentrates this wealth in a few pockets of prosperity,” wrote Marcos Emílio Gomes in Piauí. Foodstuffs exported from Brazil are exempt from export taxes thanks to the country’s “Kandir Law,” named after a former planning minister, which exempts raw and semi-elaborated export products from specific taxes. Agribusiness is the biggest beneficiary of this exemption. In contrast, family farms like Doraci's and Jurandir’s represent more than three-quarters of all farms and yet account for just 23% of the land farmed.

Yamila Goldfarb, Vice President of the Brazilian Association for Land Reform, says the contradictions in Brazil’s agricultural system are striking. “There are difficulties in accessing credit,” she tells me. “There are difficulties in obtaining technical assistance, and when you analyze who is actually producing food, it’s not on these big farms. The big farms produce commodities: soybeans, corn, cotton — products for export. They are large consumers of pesticides; they deforest. They participate in this process of grabbing lands illegally, of deforesting in order to appropriate land.”

The large farms have institutional support through think tanks, the rural caucus in congress, and other advocacy efforts. Subsistence farming, on the other hand, according to Goldfarb, is portrayed as backward and as unimportant. “But it’s not, in reality. It has huge significance because it represents food security for a large percentage of the population,” she said.

The Brazilian government’s statistical agency backs up Goldfarb’s claim, reporting that family farms produce 48% of the turnover for coffee and bananas, 80% of cassava, 69% of pineapples and 42% of beans.

Still, family agriculture is often dismissed. Alexandre Pires of the Sabiá Center, which helped Doraci and Jurandir bring their dairy products to market, pointed to a lack of political engagement with family agriculture.

“There’s an absence of a political strategy that values camponesa [small-scale farmer] agriculture, that values family agriculture,” he told me. This lack of engagement, Pires said, is draining people from rural areas.

Just two weeks before the second round of Brazil’s general election, polls showed Lula’s lead over Bolsonaro dwindling to five points, suggesting that the outcome of the runoff remains a toss-up. And with approximately 20% of the population, or nearly 33 million people, abstaining from voting in the first round of the elections, the couple’s activism takes on additional meaning.

“I know a place here where there are people with really a lot of needs,” Doraci said. “And they’re talking about Bolsonaro, which makes me want to spit. How is it that in a place like this, people want to vote for Bolsonaro?”

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"My darlings, my main mission here is to talk about Jesus, but I cannot look at how we are living and not open your eyes," said Leonardo on an Instagram video, endorsing the reelection of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The video was posted on October 3, one day after the first round of the Brazilian elections. Leonardo ended with a plea: “Leftist ideology will destroy us. Have mercy on our country.” 

Up until that day, Leonardo, who has over 33 million followers across his social media channels, had nothing to say about politics. The 32-year-old from southern Brazil had only posted motivational speeches, messages about God and the Bible, and the itinerary of his national tour. But his social media agenda changed immediately following the first round of Brazilian elections. 

In a deeply polarized country, the election was close enough that neither the right-wing populist Bolsonaro, who received 43.2% of the votes, nor Lula da Silva, his main opponent from the leftist Worker’s Party who garnered 48.4% of the votes, could claim victory. A second voting round occurs on October 30. 

In the meantime, Brazilian social media has been transformed into macabre accusations of candidate transgressions. Fake news, disinformation and misinformation have spread quickly, invoking allegations of involvement with pedophilia, freemasonry, satanic rituals and cannibalism. 

One issue, however, has dominated public debate: religion. Bolsonaro’s campaign has accused Lula of hostility to Christianity. “Religions have been instrumentalized [for political purposes] for a long time, but never like now,” said Fernanda Faria Medeiros of the Center for Studies in Communication and Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais.

Influencers of faith go online to evangelize, but they also seek to strengthen and consolidate institutional ties between their audiences and their churches. “We think that we’re discussing religion, but what we’re actually discussing is the morals of the candidates,” said Medeiros.

Armed with the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above all,” Bolsonaro has positioned himself as an envoy of a muscular Christianity, an ally of the growing evangelical electorate and the defender of their agendas, such as the non-decriminalization of drugs and abortion. 

“There is a very strong claim that runs through Bolsonaro's candidacy: that it is a candidacy that will build the kingdom of God,” said Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a professor at the University of Brasília. Bolsonaro sells himself as a politician guided by Christian ethics, said Teixeira, and that resonates with evangelicals. 

Bolsonaro has also courted evangelicals as part of his digital mobilization strategy — a centerpiece of his campaign activity. He has addressed them online and invited influencers of faith to the presidential palace on several occasions.

Yudi Tamashiro, an actor who wants to become a pastor and has millions of followers said in a video “If you follow me here, you know that every week I go to church, every week I am preaching. You already know what my vote is. My vote is for Bolsonaro.”

In the runoff, 61% of evangelical voters said they will vote for Bolsonaro, versus only 31% who say they will vote for Lula, according to a recent Datafolha survey. This could provide a decisive margin of victory for Bolsonaro. The evangelical vote is significant in Brazil: evangelicals represent 31% of Brazil’s 210 million population, and are expected to outnumber Catholics in a decade. 

The numbers should worry Lula and the Brazilian left. After the election’s first round, one of the biggest evangelical congregations, the Assembly of God, announced it will punish worshipers who “defend leftist agendas within the Marxist worldview.” Less than two weeks before the run-off, Lula issued a public letter to evangelicals stating that it was a "sad scandal" to use faith for electoral purposes, and made a commitment to the freedom of worship in the country while promising not to use symbols of faith for political gain. 

An alliance between Christian nationalism and authoritarian governance helped sweep Donald Trump into the U.S. presidency in 2016, secured majority support in Hungary to Viktor Orban, and fueled the popularity of French far-right leaders Marine le Pen and Éric Zemmour. 

Online audiences have demanded Brazilian evangelical influencers articulate this alliance out loud. On social media, the public demands a point of view, said Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher at the University of São Paulo specializing in social media. Audiences develop expectations and begin to make demands, and influencers feel compelled to reveal their politics to maintain their bond with the majority of their followers.

Influencers of faith are also modeling others’ success. In the first round of the Brazilian elections, mainstream celebrities such as the singers Anitta and Caetano Veloso supported Lula. Their campaigning had significant reach and was incorporated into Lula’s digital messaging. But their support also generated a response: influencers of faith, country singers, and others, eyeing the celebrity success in endorsing Lula, publicly embraced Bolsonaro.

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Many influencers of faith are staking out ultra-conservative, nationalist and far-right positions. These messages resonate with evangelical influencers who had never been shy about their political inclinations. “It's not a war of men, it's not a war of [political] parties, I don't even get into politics. It's just that this has gone beyond politics, it's a war of agendas," said Tiago Brunet, an evangelical pastor with five million online followers.

Evangelical support for Bolsonaro has been accompanied by accusations of a personal profit motive. Rede Super, a TV station that broadcasts evangelical programming owned by André Valadão, who has over five million followers and has preached in favor of Bolsonaro for a long time, received approximately $140,000 from Bolsonaro’s government, according to an investigation by Agência Pública.

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Other evangelical influencers have been dogged by allegations of impropriety entirely separate from politics. Evangelical pastor Ivonélio Abrahão da Silva and his influencer son Patrick Abrahão are being investigated by the Federal Police's Operation La Casa de Papel under the suspicion of a financial scheme using cryptocurrencies and emeralds that would have deceived more than one million investors in 80 countries. 

Teixeira, the professor who studies evangelical profiles and voting inclinations, said that evangelicals are not satisfied with Bolsonaro but vote for him because they are against Lula and The Worker’s Party at all costs. “They think he is the least worst in this electoral dispute, but he’s not a comfortable vote,” she adds. 

Bolsonaro’s campaign seems to know that evangelicals are not completely happy. “Don't look at my husband, look at me who is a servant of the Lord,” said First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro in October to a group of evangelical women at the Assembly of God Victory in Christ. 

Despite what it may seem, not all influencers of faith are animated by opposition to Lula. Yago Martins, head of Two Fingers of Theology, has announced that he will not vote for any candidate. Prominent pastors like Paulo Marcelo, Sérgio Dusilek and others, have publicly expressed support for Lula. 

"The digital world is built from communities of interest, or when you trigger a value that brings people together," said Karhawi, the researcher. She highlights that because of the internet’s attention span, influencers of faith can publicly support Bolsonaro now and right after the election, regardless of the result, go back to doctrinal posts about Christianity, as if nothing ever happened. Because the public is relentlessly presented with new information in social networks, there’s no time to register and elaborate, said Karhawi. Consuming social media “is going to be superficial. It's not going to generate a memory, a deep connection.”

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São Paulo, Brazil — After three years of working for restaurants as a food delivery runner, Paulo Lima suffered two traffic accidents that almost cost him his life. In 2015, he decided to quit. But when his daughter was born, and his financial situation deteriorated, he had little choice but to return. Like millions of Brazilian citizens, Lima was doing app-based delivery work to make ends meet and support his family.

"I was unemployed, so I had to go back to being a motoboy [motorcycle delivery worker]. But the apps had already taken over the market. Like everybody else, I had to sign up on the apps, pay for a motorcycle in installments and work. I went through a lot. I've been humiliated, mistreated, and I got unjustly in debt with the apps — it was outrageous."

It was this situation that led Lima to speak out against the labor practices of delivery apps online. Lima made a series of videos on social media that soon went viral. Known by his nickname, Galo ("rooster" in Portuguese), Lima started a movement called Entregadores Antifascistas, or Anti-fascist Delivery Workers. He launched a petition effort demanding that delivery platforms provide workers with meals, hand sanitizer, and personal protective equipment amid Brazil’s ongoing Covid crisis, which has had the second-highest overall death toll worldwide, after the U.S. The petition garnered more than 300,000 signatures.

In the months that followed, as the pandemic wore on and economic and working conditions deteriorated, delivery workers began demonstrating across the country. Online campaigns using coordinated hashtags asked people not to use the apps during the strikes and to pressure companies to improve conditions for workers. 

In short order, Galo, along with other delivery workers who joined the strikes, saw their earnings plunge. Suddenly, they weren’t getting any delivery requests. 

"It's sort of like a shadow ban,” he told Agência Pública, back in June 2020. “It doesn't show you've been banned but you aren't assigned any delivery orders anymore. It's been a month since I was assigned one.” 

At this point in time, Galo had begun to stand out as a leading figure in the emerging delivery workers’ movement. But it has since come to light that shadow bans aren’t the only tactic used against Galo and others who have taken part in the worker strikes.

In April of 2022, Agência Pública investigated the digital activities of iFood, the largest delivery company currently operating in Brazil and one of the largest in Latin America. We learned that the company hired digital marketing agencies to run a series of online campaigns intended to stifle movements for improved working conditions among the platform’s delivery workers. 

Founded as a startup in Brazil in 2011, iFood has come to dominate meal delivery apps in the country, recording 83% of the market share in September 2021, even before Uber Eats ended its service in Brazil. Alongside grievances voiced by delivery workers, iFood also has been criticized by restaurant owners, who say it has become virtually impossible to operate in the delivery business without going through the app. Moreover, experts and competitors point out that consumers are forced to use the platform to have access to a number of restaurant options, since iFood, among other practices, also maintains exclusivity contracts with eateries, preventing them from contracting with other delivery services. This has led competitors and industry associations, such as the Brazilian Association of Bars and Restaurants, to file legal challenges against iFood with the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), Brazil's national competition regulator.

A March 2021 study of labor conditions for gig workers at various digital platforms, including Uber, gave iFood low marks. Coordinated by the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, the study established five criteria with which to measure what can be considered “decent work.” In the analysis, on a scale of 0 to 10, iFood received a rating of just 2.

Our recent investigation sheds light on the digital side of the company’s efforts to maintain a dominant position in Brazil’s market, and to undermine workers’ calls for reform. Drawing on original documents, accounts, and records of conversations among employees at the agencies, Agência Pública traced a series of online campaigns that appear to have created inauthentic profiles and pages purporting to belong to delivery workers. The agencies involved included Comunicação Benjamim and Social Qi. Both companies are based in São Paulo, and both have portfolios that include campaigns for major political candidates. Documents obtained by Agência Pública’s reporters also indicate that Social Qi infiltrated a live demonstration held by one group of delivery workers.

During the course of our investigation, Agência Pública accessed over 30 documents — delivery reports, posting schedules of content, videos, meeting minutes and message exchanges — and spoke to multiple people who worked in the digital marketing agencies. Agency employees interviewed by Agência Pública’s reporters asked to have their names changed in this article, for fear of company reprisals.

A Facebook page designed to undercut delivery workers’ mobilization

In July 2020, iFood delivery workers organized an event called Breque dos Apps (Hit the Brakes on the Apps), a strike against poor working conditions and compensation that took place in 13 different states across Brazil. Workers demanded more transparency, an increase in the minimum earnings per delivery, improved safety and health measures and an end to unjustified suspensions on the platforms.

Eight days after the mobilization, a page called Não Breca Meu Trampo (Don’t Hit The Brakes On My Work) appeared on Facebook.

“The aim was to soften the impact of the strike and disrupt the delivery workers’ organizing efforts,” explained Marcos, a former employee of one of the agencies hired by iFood.

Maria, another former employee who worked on the marketing campaigns, told us: 

“The pages were created in order to interact with the delivery workers, to understand them — but also to help iFood in the following way: people want to hold a strike, but iFood wants to avoid this, so, instead of busting the strike and releasing a load of fake news about it, we used our [digital] intelligence to understand how we could undermine the narrative of the strike.”

A post on the Não Breca Meu Trampo Facebook page reads: “Everyone wants to earn more money, but to be used by politicians, no thanks.” The accompanying image reads: “Here's the deal…when unions and political games get involved, forget about it, man.”

On top of disrupting the delivery workers’ attempts at organizing, the Não Breca Meu Trampo (“Don’t Hit The Brakes On My Work”) Facebook page also voiced opposition to proposed legislative bills that sought to regulate app-based delivery work and increase benefits for delivery workers.

Marketing 4.0: ‘No one will suspect a thing’

Another employee who worked for one of the agencies contracted by iFood explained how this and related campaigns worked: 

“You post memes, jokes and videos that promote a certain brand or set of ideas, but without showing who is behind the content. No branding, no traces,” the source explained. “It’s the sort of content that leaves you wondering: you’re not sure whether what you saw was just a meme, something that just sprang up organically on the internet or whether there was something more to it.” In the digital advertising world, this technique is known ‘Marketing 4.0.’”

Maria, who worked on the marketing project, explained that the aim of this unofficial advertising campaign was to disseminate ideas and opinions in a way that mimicked how the delivery workers themselves were communicating, in order to give the impression that the social media posts and narratives put out by the agency were authentic, and coming from iFood delivery workers themselves. 

A document produced by the staff of the two agencies and obtained by Agência Pública explained the tactics in use: 

“We use Facebook pages, Instagram profiles, Twitter profiles, Facebook profiles, created by us to generate these conversations [about a given issue]. How do we do it? We comment on posts which talk about the issue, we go onto the pages of profiles that talk about these issues and comment in an indirect way [...], but NEVER sign our posts off as by iFood, so that nobody suspects [that a marketing agency is behind it].” 

‘We killed Galo’

A recording of a video call obtained by Agência Pública shows advertising executives from Benjamim Comunicação talking about the Não Breca Meu Trampo Facebook page. In the video, one female project manager recalls: “When we made this page, we were facing an emergency situation that we had to take care of.”

Marketing executives from Benjamim Comunicação state how, in their view, the page was probably responsible for damaging Paulo Lima's reputation and weakening his influence as one of the leading figures trying to get workers organized to push for better conditions. The strategy was to spread rumors that Galo was using the movement as a platform to get visibility and win a seat in public office, in spite of the fact that he was not running for office.

Galo recalls that as soon as the Facebook page appeared, “some couriers came to me asking who might be behind it.” He says there were growing suspicions regarding its creators, but no one had any evidence to prove who was behind Não Breca Meu Trampo.

The page actively posted content between July 2020 and June 2021. According to a video obtained by Agência Pública, Benjamim Comunicação was hired by iFood to work with their team that focused on public policy-related campaigns, between at least 2020 and 2021.

Jokes and memes

Documents obtained by Agência Publica show how, in January 2021, a separate agency called Social Qi was hired by Benjamim Comunicação to run another part of the campaign. Social Qi (SQi) took over management of the Não Breca Meu Trampo page and created at least two other related pages on Facebook and Instagram, along with at least eight fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Posted on the “Não Breca Meu Trampo” (“Don’t Slam The Brakes On My Work”) Facebook page on the exact date indicated in the previous document, the meme reads: “Hit the Brakes on the Apps is only for those who are already set in life.” The accompanying caption states: “Here we hustle every day.”

According to the documents, with the arrival of Social Qi on the scene, the range of themes and content on the page began to grow. In January 2021, the team running the project launched a new page called “Garfo na Caveira,” or “Fork in the Skull,” that mainly featured memes.

“The idea was to publish funny bits of content that would generate engagement,” Tom, an agency staff member who worked on the project, told Agência Pública. He explained that the graphics and language used in the posts were based on daily reports generated by monitoring Facebook and WhatsApp groups used by delivery workers, along with social media posts by users connected to the delivery universe, as well as research and surveys that had been commissioned by iFood.

Along with its team of approximately twelve people, the advertising agency also purchased Facebook ads in order to boost the reach of their page. Between April and August 2021, R$12,232.73 (USD $2,350) were spent on promoting the page’s posts, helping the pages to reach 3.16 million people, according to a report seen by Agência Pública.

From social media to the streets: ‘Mission Vaccine’ and Social Qi’s undercover agent

“This thing of undermining the narrative of the strikes, using [digital] intelligence and monitoring led us to a new issue: the [Covid-19] vaccine,” said Maria, who worked on the project. For more than three months, an arsenal of fan pages and fake profiles were used to push an agenda demanding that the government prioritize vaccination against Covid-19 for delivery workers. This strategic maneuver echoed some of the actual concerns voiced by workers, but then linked the call for vaccines to the importance of continuing to work, part of the anti-strike narrative.

“The strategy was to push this idea: ‘A strike is pointless. We want to get the vaccine so we can work’ or ‘We want the vaccine so that we can continue working happily.’ So that’s the narrative [these pages and accounts] started running with,” Maria told Agência Pública.

Another document obtained by Agência Pública shows the tactical planning developed by Social Qi in April 2021, with step-by-step details of the pro-vaccine campaign, which would include lobbying for support from politicians, the use of fake profiles and an online petition. Sources interviewed by Agência Pública said that the plan was executed accordingly.

The campaign for the vaccine, however, was not restricted to purely online activities. Statements and documents suggest how, on April 16, 2021, one of the advertising agency’s employees joined a group of workers during a demonstration. Pretending to be a delivery driver, the SQi employee hung up a banner that read “Vaccination for delivery app workers now!” and handed out stickers printed with the same demand. The action was touted as a key success story of the campaign and was featured in a Social Qi report for their client.

The campaign materials promoting the call for priority vaccination for delivery drivers, taken to the demonstration by the undercover employee of the advertising agency, caught the attention of the national media, who amplified the call as though it were an authentic demand of the striking drivers themselves. On the day of the strikes, “Delivery drivers call for vaccination against Covid-19,” became a popular headline for some of Brazil’s largest media outlets.

Fake profiles and micro-influencers

Sources interviewed by Agência Pública have also spoken of how the creation of fake profiles, who posed as delivery workers, was another strategy used by the advertising agencies in order to increase the reach of their propaganda in favor of the interests of their client, iFood.

This short tweet was posted on Twitter on July 23, 2021, in response to another post in support of the #ApagãodosApps [#BigAppBlackout], a genuine online campaign organized by delivery app workers in order to put pressure on their employers. On the same day, this account responded to another 23 tweets, echoing the same talking points: The account defended the delivery platforms and argued that the online campaign was harmful to workers’ interests.

Always written in the first person, the posts contained slang, grammatical errors and the expression “we moto riders,” to give the appearance that the opinions being expressed were coming from a delivery worker. But we found strong evidence that the tweets coming from this account were in fact part of a scheduled timeline of social media posts that had been created, reviewed and approved by the digital marketing agencies. Documents obtained by Agência Pública show that the same strategy was put into practice on other strike days, when the narrative developed by the marketing agencies was used by at least five different fake profiles to reply to multiple tweets by public figures, politicians and members of the general public supporting the online campaigns.

“There was a clear narrative we had to construct, and what the accounts wrote was based on this narrative. For example: if someone was saying that iFood doesn’t pay their workers very well, we would respond by saying that iFood pays x% more than its competitors and y% more than a cooperative. Our team came up with three different versions of the same response and then used them,” a source later explained.

Other tweets took aim at protesting delivery workers, attempting to raise doubts and delegitimize their cause.

What the companies say

Agência Pública’s reporters contacted all of the companies and individuals cited here for comment, making themselves available and offering to hear their side of the story via interviews, statements or phone calls. André Pontes, a Benjamin Comunicação representative, confirmed that his agency had been working for iFood since September 2020. He told us: "Our work for iFood — and this I can only comment to a certain extent, because we have a confidentiality agreement with iFood, precisely because of their competitors, such as Rappi, Loggi, etc... Our work for iFood concerns monitoring, we monitor all social media related to their cluster.”  

No other staff were willing to speak with us on the record, but each of the three companies involved did send us prepared statements. 

iFood responded with the following statement:

“With regard to Agência Pública’s request, iFood would like to state that it did not have access to the documents mentioned, and therefore, cannot comment on their content. The company regularly receives pitches and campaign proposals from a variety of communication agencies, although it has never had a commercial relationship with the company SocialQi.

iFood’s activity on social media sites is strictly in line with the law, and does not condone the use of fake profiles, the creation of false information or the automation of content production through the use of bots or the purchasing of followers.

iFood carries out its institutional communications exclusively through its official channels, and contracts agencies, such as Benjamim Digital [sic], specialized in opinion research, campaign communication and social media monitoring which track topics across a number of different platforms.”

In its own statement, Benjamim Comunicação said that the agency was “contracted by iFood to carry out opinion research and content monitoring on social media and was tasked with monitoring issues related to the food delivery ecosystem as a whole.” The statement also explained that the agency “did not sign off along with iFood ideas or campaigns proposed by Social QI, a subcontractor for a short period of time in 2021 tasked with monitoring social media sites for a number of clients,” and that it “does not agree with the practice of creating fake news, using bots or fake accounts for online interaction or the purchasing of likes and followers, and always works within the confines of legality.”

Social Qi acknowledged having monitored social media activity surrounding food delivery in Brazil in partnership with Benjamim Comunicação, and alluded to project proposals that “were not necessarily approved and accepted by the agency.” The statement read:

“In the development of our business practices, we have carried out a number of projects in partnership with Agência Benjamin [sic], including suggesting possible communication activities to its clients. In this context, we were contracted by Benjamin [sic] in 2021 to carry out social media monitoring regarding the food delivery market in Brazil, and made project proposals that were not necessarily approved and accepted by the agency.

Based purely on the questions sent by their reporters, we can assume that Agência Pública is referring to a supposed project proposal that Social QI suggested to Benjamin [sic] about the creation of a “regulatory mark”, which was not approved by the agency, and therefore, was not carried out.”

Aftermath: as federal agencies launch investigations of iFood, labor efforts continue

After this report was originally published by Agência Pública on April 4, 2022, the Garfo Na Caveira page became inactive. It has not posted any new content since our original story ran. The Não Breca Meu Trampo page had already stopped posting new content in July 2021.

In the ensuing weeks, government agencies in the city of Sao Paulo and at the federal level launched investigations of iFood’s labor and advertising practices that remain ongoing. Both the platform and the agencies are being investigated by a São Paulo City Council inquiry into labor rights violations in the app industry. The National Self-Regulating Council for Advertising has launched an investigation procedure to determine whether the companies violated Brazil’s Self-Regulating Advertisement Code. Moreover, Brazil's Public Prosecutor's Office has demanded that all involved parties respond to the facts brought to light by Agência Pública’s report and is investigating whether they have violated the workers’ rights to information.

For delivery workers, the fight continues. Galo remains a leading voice on workers’ rights in Brazil today, with a robust media presence and over 115,000 followers on Twitter. In January, he told Agência Pública that he was seeking financial support to create a resource center where delivery drivers can gather to share meals, repair their motorcycles, and organize around ongoing political challenges they face. Ultimately, Galo says, they want to take charge of delivery in some neighborhoods and to work independently, cutting out the delivery app companies altogether. Only time will tell if companies like iFood try again to foil these plans through social media, or any other means.

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The post The hidden marketing machine behind Brazil’s food delivery giant appeared first on Coda Story.

We’e’ena Tikuna grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories of slavery.

When he was young, the substance of choice to extract from his people’s piece of the rainforest was latex. The men who invaded the land called it “white gold.”

Like many Indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon from the late 1800s up until the first half of the 20th century, O’i Tikuna was forced to help them tap Pará rubber trees, letting the sticky, milky liquid run into small metal buckets and then to be exported and sold. A commodity in high demand ever since the Industrial Revolution, its popularity resurged during WWII.

At first, O’i and others from the Tikuna Umariaçu territory were promised payment and gifts for their labor. But these things never came.

“We used to be easily fooled,” says We’e’ena. “We didn’t know how to speak the white man’s language. We had to learn so we could speak to them as equals.”

Today, young Tikuna people like We’e’ena are working to make sure the right information reaches those who never left their territory. Now in her early thirties, We’e’ena is bilingual. She lives and works in the city of Alter do Chão, and runs a popular YouTube channel where she discusses Indigenous culture and rights issues. She is her grandfather’s first point of contact outside the Tikuna community and a trusted source of information, especially when it comes to decisions being made by the federal government about how to manage and protect Indigenous land.

President Jair Bolsonaro’s latest bid to make mining legal on Indigenous territories has We’e’ena, O’i and the rest of the Tikuna community worried. Long known for spouting anti-Indigenous rhetoric and attempting to diminish Indigenous rights, the far-right politician has found a new, far-fetched excuse to allow mining on Indigenous land: The war in Ukraine.

As the world’s largest exporter of coffee and soy, Brazil needs fertilizer, and a lot of it. Its largest international supplier of fertilizer is Russia. But economic sanctions imposed by the West since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have caused all exports of the product to grind to a halt. This has left Brazil on edge about a possible shortage.

For Bolsonaro, Brazil’s dependence on Russia for potassium, one of the primary nutrients of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) commercial fertilizers used in the country, is unacceptable. Opening up federally recognized and protected Indigenous land to mining, he says, would solve the problem. It’s an argument he’s been making since 2016, when he was still a member of Congress. During a plenary session that year, where he spoke about the need to use Brazil’s own potassium reserves for fertilizer production, he cited Indigenous reserves, among other things, as getting in the way.

As president, his proposed solution is to pass bill 191/2020, which would allow mining on that Indigenous land to happen. And he’s using the war in Ukraine as a political tool to drive public fear of a national food shortage, in hopes of drumming up popular support.

“POTASSIUM is our food security,” he tweeted on March 2, referring to one of the primary nutrients of commercial fertilizers used in the country. 

“With the Russia/Ukraine war, we now run the risk of a potassium shortage or an increase in its price. Our food security and agribusiness (Economy) demand of us, the Executive and Legislative branches, measures that allow us not to be externally dependent on something that we have in abundance.”

Bolsonaro insists that the potassium necessary for Brazil to produce its own fertilizers is located on Indigenous land.

The problem with that argument is that it’s not true.

According to researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), two-thirds of Brazil's potassium reserves are located outside the Amazon, in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Sergipe. Inside the rainforest, none are located on Indigenous lands that are officially recognized and protected by the federal government. Just 11% of the country’s potassium reserves are on Indigenous territories that still haven’t completed the lengthy and bureaucratic process of becoming officially recognized as Indigenous lands and protected accordingly.

“Greater independence in the production of fertilizers, including potassium, requires long-term investments in science and technology,” says Raoni Rajão, a professor of production engineering and coordinator of the Environmental Services Management Laboratory at UFMG who researches supply chain production in the Amazon.

“Allowing mining on Indigenous lands without discussing it with society will only create more problems without solving the fertilizer crisis."

Despite being false, the argument has managed to speed up the possible passage of the mining bill. Brazil’s lower house of Congress, controlled by conservative lawmakers, voted in early March to fast-track the legislation, foregoing committee debates. The bill will likely go to a vote in April.

It is unclear whether the vote will receive enough support to advance to the Senate. But one thing is certain: The rural bloc, known as the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (FPA), is sure to push for the bill to pass.

In an official statement, FPA president Sérgio Souza asserted that the FPA “defends agricultural production on Indigenous lands in Brazil.” Their plan isn’t to take away the rights of Indigenous people to their land, language and culture, he says. Rather, it is to afford them “the right to choose how they want to live economically and socially.”

For Indigenous communities, his words ring hollow and echo the false promises they’ve been offered by colonizers for centuries. Their rights are something they have had to continuously fight to protect.

Indigenous peoples from across the country will be attending the 18th edition of Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre) from April 4 to 14—an annual event in the capital city of Brasília—held to draw attention to violations of Indigenous rights and demand change. This year, one of those demands will be to put a stop to bill 191/2020.

We’e’ena Tikuna was 12 when she heard Portuguese for the first time.

Her first 11 years were spent in Tikuna Umariaçu, an Indigenous territory in the Brazilian Amazon that belongs to the Tikuna, the most populous Indigenous group in the country. There, along the Upper Solimões River, bordering Peru and Colombia, she spoke only Tikuna, learning about her people’s culture and history from her parents, grandparents, and other leaders in the community.

But her parents wanted their six children to understand more. So the family moved to Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas, where the children went to school and learned Portuguese.

High school in Manaus was hard. Studying in an entirely new language and cultural environment, and faced with incessant bullying and racism, We’e’ena struggled in school. It was a painful process, but she knew it would help her in the long run. The stories she heard from her grandfather—now 88 years old and a respected shaman in the Tikuna Umariaçu community—as a child had stuck with her. She was determined to ensure that history did not repeat itself.

Now, at 33, We’e’ena is an artist, nutritionist, and Indigenous rights activist in Alter do Chão, in Brazil Pará state, which is home to several Indigenous territories and a hotbed for illegal mining. There she has access to information that otherwise might not reach her village, where her entire family still lives. She works to make sure the Tikuna know what’s going on in government buildings far from their territory—she’s able to talk to them on a regular basis thanks to Tikuna Umariaçu’s internet connection and makes the week-long boat trip back home at least once a year—but also spreads awareness to others about the destruction of the Amazon and the violations of Indigenous rights that go hand-in-hand with it on her YouTube channel and by speaking at events like TEDx Laçador.

“Our weapon, our power, today is technology, it’s the internet,” says We’e’ena. “Things used to happen in the dark of night. But not anymore.”

As Bill 191/2020 makes its way swiftly through Congress, environmentalists and land defenders worry about the impacts it could have if it passes.

Federal protections for recognized Indigenous land like the Tikuna Umariaçu territory are some of the best defenses against deforestation in the Amazon. According to a study by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), from January to December 2020, just 3% of deforestation in the Amazon region happened on Indigenous land.

But even now, illegal mining on Indigenous territories causes immense harm to both the environment and the health of those living there.

Currently, 93.7% of mining activity in Brazil occurs in the Amazon, according to data collected by MapBiomas.

Gold mining is rampant across the region, leading to destruction of the rainforest through deforestation, but also contaminating water and soil with mercury used by miners to separate the prized mineral from other substances. The mercury contaminates water used for drinking and bathing, and seeps into fish, a main food source for many Indigenous peoples. Public health research has shown that mercury is causing illness among people of all ages in Indigenous communities, and leading to developmental challenges for children.

Without federal protections of their land, the situation is only expected to get worse. For Indigenous groups like the Tikuna, passing this bill is life or death.

“We don’t want this,” We’e’ena says. “These conditions that are being created are going to kill us.”

The post Brazil’s Congress fast-tracks plans to mine Indigenous land for potassium, blaming Russia sanctions appeared first on Coda Story.

There was barely a mask in sight. 

Bolsonaro’s TikTok audience is exploding. His followers on the youth-dominated site grew to more than 340,000 people  at a rate of almost 50% in the past month alone. Bolsonaro tries to make authoritarianism look cool. In his TikTok profile created last June, the populist, far-right president posts videos where he goes on diplomatic missions, visits his mother, plays around with his staff, and engages in the traditional politics of hugging children and giving long motivational speeches. 

Bolsonaro is known as the “Tropical Trump”. Besides similar governing styles, both leaders rode to power attacking the press as fake news and Big Tech for persecuting them. While Trump was in office, Bolsonaro made no secret of his admiration, and looked to the American for direction. Since Trump’s failure to win re-election, however, Bolsonaro has gone role model shopping. 

He has found what he’s looking for in the young men’s aisle. 

With elections coming up in October, Bolsonaro is adjusting his strategy to mimic the social media tactics of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Salvadoran researcher Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez coined the term “millennial authoritarianism” to explain the rise to power of the 40-year-old Bukele.

Bolsonaro is 66 years old. Still, the term applies to him, too, argues Vitor Machado, a political researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, in southern Brazil. Millennial authoritarianism is a political strategy, says Machado, that encompasses authoritarian behavior, populist appeals, and a modern and youthful personal brand built mainly via social media. Bolsonaro has associated his online identity with his millennial sons –who are themselves politicians– while, says Machado, fine-tuning his social media discourse to resonate with millennials. 

Speaking the same language as young people has become a key tactic for many Latin American leaders regardless of ideological leanings — from leftists such as newly-elected Gabriel Boric in Chile to authoritarians such as Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras. 

For Brazil, where Bolsonaro is widely viewed by political scientists as a threat to the future of democracy, the president’s ability to manipulate youth sentiment with his newfound social media hipness has radically changed the election calculus. 

“I see only three options: prison, death, or victory,” said Bolsonaro when questioned about the upcoming election during a meeting of religious leaders last September. More than once, the president has threatened a military coup if he loses his mandate. Though after recent confrontations with the Supreme Court — which is currently considering five criminal inquiries into the president — he has downplayed his threat. “Who never told a little lie to their girlfriend? If you didn’t, the night wouldn’t end well,” he said to the laughter of an audience of allies. 

The Bolsonaro Family on TikTok 

When searching “Bolsonaro” on TikTok, dozens of related hashtags appeared, including “bolsonaro2022” and its less popular counterpart “bolsonarocorrupt.” The total posts with the “Bolsonaro” tag have, collectively, more than five billion views. And, although TikTok has a delicate relationship with political content because of its moderation guidelines, Bolsonaro does not seem to be dividing opinions. 

The platform appears to be on his side: the first 15 hashtags that pop up are either positive or neutral. 

“Populist discourse is easy to understand and offers easy solutions,” says Veridiana Cordeiro, one of the lead researchers of Digital Sociology and Artificial Intelligence at the University of São Paulo. According to Cordeiro, millennials seek unconventional forms of political and civic engagement, and being active on social media is among them. “Flashy and performative posts are what bring adherence on social networks. Bolsonaro has managed to gain popularity with this type of political strategy.”. 

Bolsonaro follows only four people on TikTok: Senator Flávio Bolsonaro who joined the platform last May and is known in Brazil as “son 01”; city councilor Carlos Bolsonaro who joined last October and is known as “son 02”; a Wolverine cosplay; and a Brazilian magician. 

Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, “son 03”, does not have a TikTok profile and has even argued in favor of banning the app in Brazil.

Meanwhile, the president does not follow 23-year-old “son 04.” This is puzzling because Jair Renan was the first in his family to create a TikTok account, last March, and has the largest number of followers: almost 430,000. In his posts, he is an ardent proponent of his father’s politics.  

In one video, he makes fun of products from China and criticizes their quality. In another, he appears in a shooting range, playing with rifles of different models.

“Not only Jair Renan, but the entire family fuels millennial authoritarianism,” explains Machado. Jair Renan’s half-brothers, Flávio and Carlos, also have their share of popular posts. Flávio regularly shows videos of Bolsonaro engaged in “cool activities” such as riding a sports car that belongs to the Federal Police and playing football with Arab sheiks. 

Brazil has 160 million social media users, more than any other non-Asian country except the United States. Brazilians also score high in terms of time dedicated to social media, reaching almost 4 hours a day, behind the Philippines and Columbia, according to We Are Social. 

The amount of time that Brazilians spend on social media has helped Bolsonaro in the past. In 2018, the year he won the election, the Supreme Electoral Court gave him only 48 seconds per week of unpaid electoral advertisements on public radio and television. Bolsonaro was affiliated with the Social Liberal Party, and, because of the party’s low representation rates, was granted less exposure time than his main opponents — lefist Fernando Haddad, from the Worker’s Party, and centrist Ciro Gomes, from the Democratic Labour Party. 

As a result of these disadvantages on broadcast media, Bolsonaro took his presidential campaign to social media and won. He now has social media accounts in conservative social networks such as Gettr and Parler. In fact, he is the only world leader active on both outlier platforms. 

These apps have grown rapidly in Brazil by promising a hands-off approach on censorship and the spread of misinformation. According to data company Sensor Tower, downloads of Gettr and Parler in Brazil are the second-highest of any country, just behind the United States.

Still, they are tiny compared to the number of Brazilians using Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, and the other major apps in Brazil. TikTok alone has almost 5 million users. Millennial authoritarianism, therefore, has become a crucial component of his re-election bid. 

This puts Bolsonaro in something of a vice, says Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher at the the University of São Paulo specialized in social media. While hostile to the biggest social media platforms, he depends on them to mainstream his online engagement. Karhawi says that Bolsonaro and his family have built a social media juggernaut around themselves — a community that started with 8 million followers and that now, four years later, amounts to over 42 million, almost twice as many as his five main potential opponents in the upcoming election.

Bolsonaro’s brand of politics comes at an opportune time for capturing Brazil’s youth vote. Research suggests that millennials are disillusioned with liberal democracy and increasingly open to non-democratic forms of government. “Unlike their parents who experienced an authoritarian regime, millennials grew up in a democratic government and find themselves politically disillusioned and disengaged,” argues Cordeiro, the digital sociology expert at the University of São Paulo, who says the absence of a living memory of military dictatorship is decisive in Brazil. 

Bolsonaro uses this “foggy memory” to push country-first, socially conservative, and ethnically majoritarian policies and posts and is able to leverage the divisiveness common to both social networks and populist politics. “If we continue to observe the prevalence of polarized attitudes among millennials, we can increasingly have fertile ground for populist policies,” Cordeiro said. 

Fake news as a strategy 

Discrediting legitimate media reports as “fake news” has been a central component of Bolsonaro’s administration. The president frequently encourages his supporters to follow him on his social media channels so he can bypass the press, control his image, and shape the political narrative around himself while disavowing democratic institutions.

He is also accused of spreading disinformation and misinformation. A Federal Police case is looking into the so-called “Office of Hate”: a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus allegedly led by Bolsonaro’s sons and a group of young supporters committed to attacking government opponents and journalists. 

In the congress, legislators have tried to find solutions, presenting at least 45 bills aimed at curbing the spread of fake news. The measures proposed are diverse. Some would allow users who share fake news to be prosecuted as criminals; and some pressure tech platforms to ban Bolsonaro, his family, and his supporters — similar to what happened with Trump in early 2021. 

Aware of the possibility of losing his profiles on key social media channels, Bolsonaro is taking countermeasures of his own. In September 2021, he signed a decree forbidding social media platforms from banning users or taking down their content without a court order. It marked the first time social media companies had been stopped by a national government from taking down users’ content from their own platforms. 

The decree was ruled unconstitutional just a few days later but it set Bolsonaro on a path to use all tools and maneuvers at his disposal to protect himself and his allies on social media.

The researcher also says that even though Bolsonaro has had a good run on social media, his strategy is dangerous. “When we see a president communicating almost exclusively on social media, we slowly observe a disavowal of democratic institutions, more specifically of the media, both traditional media and institutional or governmental media,” says Karhawi. “There is no such thing as an individual capable of embodying politics, the media and the truth.”

The post Millennial authoritarianism rises in Brazil as Bolsonaro takes on TikTok appeared first on Coda Story.

When the delegation returned from Florida, Wajngarten tested positive for Covid-19. Before long, 24 members of the visiting team were also diagnosed. Then, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo told Fox News that his father had contracted the virus.

A media frenzy ensued. Bolsonaro took to Facebook to insist he had tested negative, posting a photograph of himself making an obscene gesture to the press. All the same, he was ordered into isolation by medical staff. No one knew for sure whether he was positive or not and, for a couple of days, the world wondered if he had passed the infection on to Trump. 

Nationwide protests against Brazil’s congress, which was locked in battle with the presidency over control of the annual budget, had been scheduled by Bolsonaro supporters for Sunday March 15. Bolsonaro originally discouraged the gatherings, owing to the pandemic. On the day, though, he broke quarantine to greet hundreds of demonstrators outside the presidential palace. 

Bolsonaro continued to act erratically, saying that the media had grossly exaggerated the threat posed by Covid-19, describing it as a “fantasy” and as a “gripezinha” (little flu).

Today, Brazil — a nation of 210 million people — has racked up more than ten million confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 250,000 deaths. These figures place it second in the world for fatalities, behind only the United States. Appalled by the statistics, numerous state governors have turned against the nation’s president. And, yet, he has shown little remorse. 

“So what?” Bolsonaro said, when reporters questioned him in late April about the thousands who had already lost their lives. “What do you want me to do?” 

It wasn’t always like that. In the early days of the pandemic, Brazil responded robustly. In March, major cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro introduced swift and stringent quarantine measures. International travelers were barred from entering the country and the government announced nearly $16 billion in support for states and municipalities to cope with the public health and economic impacts of the pandemic. 

As the death toll soared in Europe and elsewhere, Brazil seemed well prepared. But Bolsonaro smashed any early sense of optimism, continuing to play down the severity of the virus, contradicting his own government’s health advice and endorsing widely discredited drugs such as hydroxychloroquine. In less than a month, health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta resigned, followed by his successor Nelson Teich, who was, in turn, replaced by General Eduardo Pazuello. As these events played out, the death toll soared.

Despite his apparent negligence, public support for Bolsonaro has not melted away, holding steady at around 40%. This may, in large part, be attributed to a deep distrust and paranoia that underpins politics in Brazil. Bolsonaro, a former army captain who ran for election with the far-right Social Liberal Party, is the archetypal populist leader. Unfiltered, crass and belligerent, his leadership has been characterized by vocal animosity towards institutions, experts of any kind and the communists he believes have infiltrated every aspect of the state and civil society. 

The Brazilian far-right has for decades pushed the narrative that a left-wing conspiracy is secretly pulling the country’s political strings. As well as being embraced by politicians, these beliefs are tacitly endorsed by the nation’s powerful military. But others have different ideas about who is working Brazil’s levers of power.

While large sections of the domestic and international press have been quick to paint Bolsonaro’s behavior as blindly chaotic, some observers believe that it is part of a coordinated strategy of creating political crises in order to bolster the standing of Brazil’s military. Retired and serving military figures account for nearly half of Bolsonaro’s cabinet, with former four-star generals forming the inner core of his government — a strong position from which to present the army as a stable counterweight to the caprices of democracy.

The feedback loop

Piero Leirner, an anthropologist at the Federal University of São Carlos in São Paulo state, has spent 28 years studying hierarchical structures within the Brazilian military. A softly spoken and understated man of 51, he believes that the existence of such a program has become increasingly apparent during the global pandemic. 

“This crisis only seems to have accelerated this feedback loop,” he told me. “Creating deliberate discord is now a daily occurrence.”

Leirner asserts that an ideologically driven cadre of senior military figures — including retired general Vice-President Hamilton Mourão — has installed itself at the highest level of state. He also believes that the Brazilian army is pursuing a campaign of “hybrid warfare,” using a broad range of communications channels, from messaging apps to traditional media, to create a torrent of disinformation so strong that it has eroded and reshaped collective perceptions of reality. Its divisive narratives, he adds, have created a pervasive sense of conflict, in which “enemy combatants” are widely believed to be conspiring to destroy the nation from within. 

By way of illustration, Leirner points to the widespread idea that the center-left Workers Party, one of Brazil’s leading mainstream political groups, is part of an international communist plot. While similar conspiracy theories flow freely around the world, Leirner believes that Brazil is unique in that such narratives are being seeded by the military, against the very population it is supposed to serve. 

He also says that the army’s strategy is so covert that many of those involved may not be aware of the roles they are playing — even Bolsonaro himself.

“The most fundamental principle of hybrid war is that most of its agents or combatants carry out maneuvers and offensives without knowing what they are doing,” he said.

In the first of several conversations between March and July, Leirner explained that the aim of this information battle is to make people believe that, rather than relying on democratically elected politicians, Brazil is better off with the army running things. He also views the nation’s current state as just the latest chapter in a long-running story.

Inside the academy

Back in 1992, Leirner was starting a masters degree in anthropology at the University of São Paulo and scouting around for something to base his thesis on. As the son of an artist and a psychologist, he had no connection to the military and certainly hadn’t planned on building his academic career around it. However, his supervisor was hooked on the subject and pointed him in its direction.

Leirner, then 23, initially thought of conducting field work with frontier platoons performing national security duties in the Amazon. 

Brazil’s military dictatorship, which began with the toppling of the left-wing President João Goulart in the mid-1960s, had ended in 1985. The country’s transition to democracy was still ongoing and the army was constructing a new role for itself. 

The top brass believed that the military regime had been too closely aligned with the U.S and had exposed Brazil’s wealth of natural resources — including gold, diamonds, iron ore and vast reserves of hydroelectric power — to exploitation by foreign powers. No longer in charge of the country’s destiny, they feared that history would repeat itself under the new democratic system, and so had formulated a doctrine based around presenting the army as the only viable defender of the Amazon’s riches. 

In preparation for his planned field work in the Amazon, Leirner gained access to the Army Command School (ECEME) in Rio de Janeiro, an elite academy that trains officers to become generals. However, it turned out that the school itself offered abundant material for ethnographic research.

At first, Leirner was welcomed as an academic observer and put to work reading texts and keeping records. During his time there, he came to realize that the ECEME was trying to forge a closer relationship with scholars, the goal being to jointly define the core ideas of what the military envisaged as a “common project for Brazil.” The collective view was that the country lacked a natural ruling class capable of “completing the mission” of national development. The armed forces and universities were the only institutions considered both disciplined and hierarchical enough for the job. 

“There was the idea that Brazilian elites were extremely disorganized and unable to establish a project for the nation, and that, therefore, it fell to the military to organize it,” Leirner said.

Although the military had largely accepted the demise of its dictatorship, Leirner recalled that the ECEME was a hotbed of skepticism regarding democratic change. The majority of officers believed that the army still constituted the backbone of Brazil and that it should play the leading role in the country’s rebirth. Accordingly, they envisaged the military at the center of a network of like-minded politicians and academics dominating the Brazilian state. 

To draw up that framework, the ECEME invited visitors from both the left and right of the political spectrum. One was the prominent ultra-conservative commentator Olavo de Carvalho. 

In his incendiary columns for Brazilian newspapers, Carvalho spread the narrative that the communist threat, which the military had used as a pretext for seizing power in the 1960s, was still alive and well. The only difference was that now, rather than seeking legitimate political power, the left was waging a clandestine war, via a wholesale takeover of the media, academia and the intellectual sphere. As it has in reactionary movements around the world, this idea of “cultural Marxism’ was to prove highly influential.

“It matched perfectly with what the military was looking for, which was an ideological counter-attack,” Leirner told me. “It reached a point that you could no longer tell what was his idea and what was the military's.” 

While at the ECEME, Leirner became immersed in the military worldview, which saw everything through what he describes as the “friend-enemy dichotomy,” that everyone and everything — nations, foreign armies, institutions and ideologies, even ordinary civilians — is either an ally or an adversary. 

Although the military was meant to be his subject, there came a point when Leirner began to think that it was he who was really being studied.

“They said that they always knew what I was doing, implying that I was being bugged, surveilled,” he told me.

Leirner felt that he was the focus of an elaborate psychological experiment. He was routinely assigned mundane tasks and endless rereadings of the same texts; one particular chapter from Carl von Clausewitz’s classic of military strategy “On War” sticks in his mind. He was also frequently instructed to prepare for events that never took place, then told that he had misunderstood. Then came what he refers to as “fidelity tests” — innumerable interview sessions, ostensibly to facilitate his research, but were reversed to make him feel like he was under interrogation. 

“They were trying to find out if I really had the potential to be an infiltrator in the academic world,” Leirner said. 

Meanwhile, normal daily interactions would involve two army personnel speaking to him in tandem: one adopting a sympathetic role, the other coldly aggressive. It was the classic good cop-bad cop scenario, something that Leirner would later recognize, with increasing regularity, on the political stage.

In 1997, after five years at the ECEME, Leirner published “Meia-volta, Volver” (“U-Turn, Return”), a study that detailed the dynamics of power, obedience and ideology at play in the Brazilian military. It rapidly became clear that he had displeased someone at the top. 

“They never told me anything. They just closed the door to further research at the ECEME,” he said. 

Despite that lack of access, Leirner continued to produce ethnographic studies of the army. In 2010, he finally made it to the Amazon to spend time with the border platoons, but his efforts were frustrated and his access to subjects impeded. After that, he resolved to abandon his work on the military, but events would soon pull him back in. 

The Big Bang

During the 1990s, Brazil had developed into a thriving globalized economy. In 2003, the Workers Party candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated as president. Popularly known as Lula, he had, despite his left-wing roots, risen to power on a ticket of working with Brazil’s business elite, in order to bring increased prosperity to ordinary people. 

By the time Lula was succeeded by his former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff in January 2011, the economy was growing at an annual rate of 7%. But, within a year, Rousseff’s enormous popularity had evaporated and the economy, like many others, was suddenly tanking as a result of the global financial crisis. Conspiracy theories abounded that the Workers Party was leading the country towards a Venezuela-style regime. 

Following a large-scale investigation into corruption involving Brazilian politicians and state companies, known as Operation Car Wash, mass protests erupted. Although there was no direct evidence that Rousseff had been involved in graft, she was impeached in April 2016 over a minor budgetary infringement and removed from office. She was succeeded by her vice-president Michel Temer, of the center-right Brazilian Democratic Movement, who was also charged with corruption during his presidency and then, in 2019, arrested. 

Lula was convicted on little concrete evidence and, in 2018, jailed for 12 years — a move that prevented him standing in that year’s presidential election, which opinion polls had predicted he would win. He was freed in 2019, until such time as the appeals process is exhausted.

It was Rousseff’s downfall that drove Piero Leirner to turn his attention back to the military. Soon, he realized just how active it had been behind the scenes. The ideas he had seen being developed at the ECEME had, he believes, coalesced into a coherent plan for domination of Brazil’s political structures and institutions by the army.

“I went after clues to understand what was going on,” he explained. “The whole ‘project for Brazil’ narrative had turned into the Big Bang.” 

Leirner dug around internal military manuals, publications and websites. He found a mass of material referring to the use of information channels to confuse and disorient selected political targets. It was immediately familiar to him. Nearly a decade earlier, he had been exploring the use of anthropologists in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S military. While completing a postdoctoral study at the University of Lisbon, he had obtained a number of NATO and U.S. military field manuals containing similar details of counterinsurgency and psychological operations. He also uncovered a direct link to his time at the ECEME. 

“I came across things written about hybrid war by one of the very colonels who guided me at the beginning of my masters,” Leirner said, adding that the man in question later became a four-star general, the highest rank in the Brazilian military. 

While such tactics were used by U.S forces against foreign adversaries, in Brazil they were specifically ranged against “internal threats.” Leirner also uncovered an update of the old communist conspiracy theory. The military had identified a “narco-terrorist-neo-communist alliance 2.0” as its new bete noire. Left-wingers, drug traffickers and criminal gangs had been folded together to form a unified threat to Brazil that only the army could stop. 

The narrative would soon become a central feature of right-wing discourse within the country. Owing to an ongoing boom in cellular connectivity, the internet proved the perfect delivery system for it. 

According to one survey, 61% of Bolsonaro supporters said they got their political news through WhatsApp, compared to 38% of Workers Party supporters. Ahead of the 2018 presidential election, WhatsApp was flooded with fake news forwarded to thousands of users at a time by Bolsonaro supporters.

Leirner said that he believes that the military uses social networks and messaging apps as “relay stations,” within a wider “swarm strategy” to seed manufactured narratives, the content and spread of which is carefully crafted to look organic. 

“Nobody realizes that there is an architecture by which this was designed,” he said. 

Later, Bolsonaro’s official spokesman General Rego Barros — the former head of communications for the military — essentially confirmed Leirner’s theories. 

“It was up to the army to plunge headlong into the social media underworld: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp,” he said in a February 2019 parting speech from the military, before assuming his new government role. He added that those steps were taken in order for the army to “become the public agency with the greatest influence in the digital world in Brazil.” 

Leirner didn’t work alone. He established a network of experts and analysts who discovered the military’s vast reach in civil society. Apart from its networks of digital militia, it had cultivated links within business, the media, the judiciary and state prosecution offices. Prominent members of those fields were invited to give speeches and meet with personnel at military schools and institutions, and some were given special honors and awards.

As the 2018 election approached, Leirner realized that the military’s support was consolidating itself behind Bolsonaro, then a fringe congressman and one of the few Brazilian politicians to publicly express nostalgia for the dictatorship. Influential figures, such as former general Augusto Heleno, strongly backed him, both publicly and to military audiences, lending crucial momentum to his campaign. 

On the election trail, Bolsonaro was offensive, outrageous and uncompromising. By comparison, the vice-presidential candidate Hamilton Mourão, a retired general, appeared sensible, measured, statesmanlike: the good cop-bad cop scenario once again.

At the same time, senior military officers and reservists made great efforts to convince rank-and-file troops that Bolsonaro was the solution to Brazil’s problems. According to Leirner, it was an “incredible feat of engineering,” enlisting high-profile military retirees trained during the dictatorship. However, perhaps the most important voice of all was that of a civilian who had established close links to the ECEME and other military institutions decades earlier.

The mastermind

Olavo de Carvalho, a self-styled philosopher who never finished high school, is widely regarded as the intellectual godfather of the Brazilian far-right. His ideas are reactionary, hardline Catholic, often conspiratorial and invariably filled with homophobic and misogynistic rhetoric. 

He is also extremely popular. His Facebook and YouTube pages total more than a million followers, and thousands have taken the online philosophy course he launched back in 2009. Fewer, however, are aware of the precise nature and depth of his relationship with the Brazilian military. 

In a video chat from his home in Richmond, Virginia, in early September, Carvalho acknowledged visits to the ECEME and other military-linked institutions dating back to the 1990s. He also admitted that he had warned high-ranking officers that communists would stage a takeover by stealth of the entire country. He remains unshakable in that conviction.

“Everything happened exactly as I described it, but now it's too late,” he told me, with a hearty laugh. 

Yet Carvalho insists that he has had little real influence on Brazil’s current trajectory or the military’s role in it. The reason for this, he said, is because senior officers are “too stupid” to understand his ideas. Despite several of Bolsonaro’s ministers being avowed Carvalho fans and even online alumni, he described the notion that he holds any sway over the government as “absurd.” 

“Nobody in the government pays attention to me,” he said. “If I were their guru, everything would be far better.” 

Carvalho sat in front of wooden shelves stacked with books, dressed in a salmon pink shirt and wearing large glasses that slid down his nose as he talked. He exuded a kind of grandfatherly charm, portraying himself as an affable and misunderstood genius. But, the truth is that he is far from ignored.

“When the military government finished, the only political force that had survived was the communists. And the communists dominate everything,” he told me. “How can they say that they freed Brazil from communists? On the contrary — they gave Brazil to the communists.” 

Brazil’s military dictatorship is widely considered to have suppressed opposition voices and committed numerous egregious human rights abuses, but Carvalho denies that they did anything of the sort. 

“The real story of the military coup was not written yet,” he said, adding that, for many years, he was “the only journalist that defended the honor of the armed forces.” 

In his bestselling books, Carvalho has attempted to expose what he believes to be a communist invasion of Brazilian civic and cultural life. According to him, communists are now all-powerful and in cahoots with organized crime. 

“The leftists and the drug dealers control the House of Representatives and the Senate,” he said, thumping his desk. “So they don't permit Bolsonaro to do anything he wants to do.” 

He described Bolsonaro as a “general manager” with no real power because communists effectively control every arm of the state. “Politically he can do nothing. He's a half-president,” he said.

Carvalho does concede that the army casts a long shadow over Bolsonaro’s government, though. “The president would never do anything that can displease the military,” he told me. “He was just a captain — he's surrounded by generals now. This has some psychological importance.” 

Such unflattering pronouncements gloss over how connected the two men are. At his 2018 presidential acceptance speech, Bolsonaro placed one of Carvalho’s books — “The Minimum You Need to Know Not to Be an Idiot” — on the lectern, beside the Bible. 

Carvalho maintains that they have spoken on the phone and in person only a handful of times since Bolsonaro became president. However, two of Bolsonaro’s sons, Flavio and Eduardo, have traveled to Virginia to meet him.

In 2017, Eduardo appeared in videos at Carvalho’s house, wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Olavo is right.” Then, in 2019, he attended a screening of a documentary about Carvalho, hosted in Washington D.C. by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. There, he told the audience that “without Olavo, there would be no President Bolsonaro.” 

Carvalho says that he has simply been engaged in a grassroots ideological battle, using his website, internet courses and YouTube videos to spread the word. In a 2019 interview with The Atlantic, he proudly stated he had created a “genius factory online” and went on to boast that his “influence on Brazil's culture is infinitely bigger than anything the government is doing.” 

In a Brazilian congressional commission on fake news earlier this year, Carvalho was linked to online mobs that spread disinformation and coordinate personal attacks on political opponents. When I asked him about this, he said that the people who served on the commission had no idea what fake news was and no clue what they were talking about. They, like pretty much everyone else, were “stupid.”

Setting fires

Speaking to Leirner and Carvalho is enough to make a person question the entire concept of political reality in Brazil.

Carvalho scoffed at Leirner’s theory that the military has been secretly waging an information war against the country. “They are not smart enough to do this,” he said. The military has also long denied any influence on the nation’s politics. However, Leirner’s ideas seem increasingly credible.

General Eduardo Villas Bôas, who served as army commander during much of the past tumultuous decade, has consistently claimed that the army is politically neutral. Yet, after being inaugurated as president in January 2019, Bolsonaro praised Bôas for helping him win. Comments by Bôas about the military’s “institutional mission,” made the day before a crucial 2018 hearing on whether to remand Lula in custody for the duration of appeals against his sentence, were also seen by many as a public declaration of the military’s full-blooded return to politics. The next day, Lula was duly jailed. 

After becoming president, Bolsonaro appointed Sergio Moro, the judge who originally convicted Lula, as minister of justice and public security. Later, in June 2019, The Intercept Brasil published leaked messages that revealed how Moro had advised state prosecutors working on the very Operation Car Wash cases he was adjudicating — including Lula’s. Moro, like many other judges and prosecutors, also has close ties to elite military-linked institutions, including Brazil’s Superior School of War.

Now, military figures make up nearly half of Bolsonaro’s cabinet. Leirner says that they observe a strict pecking order, based on the year they became officers during the dictatorship: Hamilton Mourão, as vice president; Fernando Azevedo as minister of defense and Edson Pujol as army commander. 

“This is a line that does not dissolve easily,” Leirner told me.

Under these men, Brazil already faces numerous challenges, from the ravages of the coronavirus to a rapidly contracting economy. According to the World Bank, the country is projected to fall into its deepest recession on record and has already experienced steep drops in personal income and employment. Like many other nations, its people will be looking to the government for solutions. However, according to Leirner, they should, instead, be braced for even more political fires, set deliberately for the army to put out. 

The post The information war eroding political reality in Brazil appeared first on Coda Story.

The only problem is that this widely used antiparasitic drug is unproven as a treatment or a protection against the coronavirus.

Proclaiming ivermectin "another weapon in our war against the coronavirus," Morastoni urged everyone to embrace its use, avoid crowds and wear masks. Soon after, people began to line up outside the city’s 200,000 square foot events center to collect their allocation of the miracle immunity-boosting pills. Some had even taken a ferry from a neighboring municipality.

Behind the United States, Brazil has the second-highest Covid-19 infection figures in the world, with more than 3,600,000 confirmed cases and 115,300 deaths. People were understandably desperate to be shielded from the virus. 

Morastoni’s move was not without precedent. In late April, Itajai’s local authorities launched a campaign to distribute the homeopathic remedy Camphora to residents as a protective measure. Soélia Fernandes Ferreira Nunes, a local accountant, dismissed the whole idea, skeptical that a single dose of five small pellets could prevent her from contracting the disease. 

Her approach to ivermectin was different. Nunes believed that the drug was safe, because she had given it to her eight-year-old daughter during an outbreak of head lice at school. Despite the absence of conclusive scientific evidence to support the use of ivermectin, she decided that she and her family would take a chance on it. 

"I figured it couldn't do any harm," she told me over the telephone. "If it's something that can improve my immunity and make my body healthier, then I want it." 

After two of the three suggested doses, Nunes said that she and her daughter both experienced nausea and diarrhea. Although both are known side effects of ivermectin, she said that at one point she feared they could be symptoms of Covid-19. 

Nunes, 48, also takes prescribed medication for high blood pressure. She said that she did consider whether taking ivermectin would have an adverse reaction with it, but did not consult with a physician.

"I also felt dizzy, I would be walking and have to lean on the fridge," she added, describing another known reaction to the drug. "My husband said it was out of nervousness from following the news." 

As of July 31, authorities in Itajaí had handed out more than 1.5 million ivermectin pills. The town’s attempts to battle Covid-19 have attracted both praise and criticism — the latter especially after Morastoni suggested that diagnosed coronavirus patients should undergo rectal ozone therapy. 

Some residents told me that they felt like "a national joke" and a "lab experiment," and complained about misallocation of resources. The town has spent roughly $800,000 on ivermectin, but its death toll and case numbers continue to rise. When the initiative launched in early July, the city had confirmed 2,138 coronavirus cases and 45 deaths. By August 23, these figures had jumped to 5,020 and 144, according to the local government's own data. 

Nunes said she feels conflicted about taking the medication. She doesn't believe that a cure for Covid-19 exists yet, but hopes that ivermectin will make her more resistant. Acknowledging the contradictions of her stance, she also said that she tries to follow recommendations by reputable health authorities and scientists, not politicians. 

"It's municipal election year and this is all campaign material," she said. "They aren't looking at lives, they're looking at votes." 

Across Brazil, public officials, doctors and journalists are promoting ivermectin as a silver bullet. Despite contracting the virus himself, President Jair Bolsonaro has downplayed Covid-19 as a "little cold," opposed lockdown measures and touted drugs like hydroxychloroquine as an answer. At least one of his ministers has alluded to the alleged benefits of ivermectin. Whether on its own or in combination with other medicines and supplements, the idea of repurposing this widely available drug is gaining traction in Latin America.

The surge of interest in ivermectin can be traced back to an Australian study published in April. The research conducted by Monash University showed that a single dose could eliminate the virus within 48 hours in a laboratory setting. 

Scientists behind the research have noted, however, that clinical trials, of which at least 33 are ongoing worldwide, are still needed to determine the effectiveness on humans. "The potential use of ivermectin to combat Covid-19 remains unproven," they stated.

The Pan American Health Organization has advised against the use of ivermectin to treat or prevent Covid-19, warning of a number of observational studies with high risk of bias and low certainty of evidence. One such paper prompted several Latin American leaders to endorse the drug, but has since been found to be based on unreliable data and retracted. 

"There is a political narrative and a disinformation strategy in place to minimize the pandemic and make people think there's an easy solution," Fred Fernandes, a pulmonary specialist at Hospital das Clínicas at the University of São Paulo Medical School, told me by telephone. "You replace one magic potion with another as a way to circumvent what scientific evidence is showing." 

On social media, proponents of ivermectin have resorted to fallacies and half-truths to support their claims, including that the long-standing use of the drug in Africa has helped to keep the pandemic under control on the continent. 

Brazil's main champion of ivermectin, Lucy Kerr, an ultrasound expert who talks about the supposed danger of mammograms to women, claims to have cured at least 20 patients in two days after reading the Australian study's findings. The mayor of Itajaí has called her a "pioneer in the fight for ivermectin." She often points to personal observations and testimonies shared by colleagues on WhatsApp groups as proof of the drug's benefits. Her videos endorsing the drug, one of which was recently taken down by YouTube for spreading misinformation, reach hundreds of thousands of people. 

"In-vitro studies required a dose 10 times higher than what’s currently used in tablets to have a modest action in terms of preventing viral replication," said Margareth Dalcolmo, a pulmonologist and researcher with the Rio de Janeiro-based Oswaldo Cruz Foundation's National School of Public Health, who has recovered from the disease. Her institution is part of a collective international effort led by the World Health Organization to test potential treatments for the coronavirus. Ivermectin is not included on this list. 

"The way these pills, which I call 'hope drugs,' are being administered and distributed like candy bags, it's very detached from reality. It's irrational and reckless," Dalcolmo added. 

In June alone, 8.6 million packages of ivermectin, usually containing two or four pills, were sold nationwide. In response to the unprecedented demand, Anvisa, the Brazilian health regulator, prohibited the purchase of ivermectin without a prescription and underscored that there are no approved drugs for the prevention or treatment of Covid-19. 

On Facebook groups such as Friends of Ivermectin, which has 6,000 members, users say that soaring prices and stock shortages have made the medication more difficult to get hold of. As a result, some people appear to be turning to veterinary versions. In line with a recent statement from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, governing bodies representing veterinarians and pharmacists in Brazil have cautioned against the use of drugs intended for animals. 

Instead of science-based information, the tone of conversation around ivermectin is increasingly being set by anecdotal evidence. Across social media, enthusiasts attribute their own or a relative's recovery to the supposed "lifesaving properties" of the drug, urging others to publicly share similar stories.

Amid escalating political polarization in the country, Leonardo Weissmann, a consultant with the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases, said the drug has sparked "an ideological war." 

"No one speaks the same language anymore," he added. 

Nunes, her husband and daughter are set to take the last dose of ivermectin any day now. She still fears the disease, especially when notifications from the local government pop up on her phone about confirmed cases in her neighborhood. 

However, unlike many of her fellow Brazilians, who have continued to crowd beaches and parks and are refusing to wear masks, she plans to stay at home in self-quarantine. "They think they are Superman or Wonder Woman and they are living as if there was no tomorrow," she said. "But I won't feel safe until there is mass testing and a vaccine." 

"I fear becoming one of those cases that end up on television of families who don't have a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones."

Illustration by Sofiya Voznaya

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