Brazil’s New President, Jair Bolsonaro, and the Rise of Latin American Authoritarianism

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Brazil’s New President, Jair Bolsonaro, and the Rise of Latin American Authoritarianism

Podcast: The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode Date: November 1, 2018
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guest: John Lee Anderson (Staff Writer, The New Yorker)
Duration: ~16 minutes

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Overview

This episode explores the election of right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s president, examining his rise within the context of Latin America's political shifts. Host Dorothy Wickenden interviews New Yorker staff writer John Lee Anderson to analyze Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, his background, Brazil’s recent political history, and the potential implications for democracy and authoritarianism in the region.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who is Jair Bolsonaro?

[02:07 – 03:42]

• Bolsonaro is a former military officer from the era of Brazil’s dictatorship and has served in Congress for 27 years, always as a political extremist.

• Anderson recounts Bolsonaro’s well-documented bigotry and harsh rhetoric:

  • “He roughly shoved a female lawmaker, called her a slut, and told her that she was not pretty enough to rape. He recently revisited that language in another altercation with the same lawmaker.” — John Lee Anderson [03:23]
  • On minorities: On record saying he’d “rather see his son die than become gay.”

• Bolsonaro’s campaign promised a crackdown using “Cold War throwback language,” including:

  • Jailing opponents (“Red Bandits will be banished from the homeland”)
  • Branding opposition as “terrorists”
  • Pledging an “iron hand and a clean sweep”

“This is different to what we’ve seen elsewhere in Latin America in the past 30 years. I would say I’ve not seen anybody emerge on the political scene this radical since the latter days of the Cold War...” — John Lee Anderson [04:37]

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2. Historical Context: The Rise and Fall of the Left in Brazil

[05:16 – 07:39]

• Latin America shifted leftward in the early 2000s (“the pink tide”), with Lula’s Brazil as a key example.
• Lula, once highly popular, fell from grace due to corruption scandals; his successor Dilma Rousseff was impeached.
• The economic boom stalled, incomes dropped, and optimism faded.
• Anderson contrasts Brazil’s short-lived economic rise with its sharp recent decline, paving way for Bolsonaro’s appeal.

“Lula famously pulled 40 million or so Brazilians out of extreme poverty, [but] he never dealt with properly the insecurity in the country. And so that's risen and risen and risen.” — John Lee Anderson [08:26]

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3. Lawlessness, Inequality, and Public Insecurity

[07:39 – 09:39]

• Explores why Bolsonaro’s law-and-order message resonated:

  • Brazil’s murder rate is among the world’s highest (~64,000 in a year).
  • “97% out of all murders go unsolved.”
  • Widespread police corruption and huge racial inequities.

• Anderson faults the left (PT) for failing to address chronic insecurity.

• Links Bolsonaro’s tactics and discourse directly to global trends, especially Donald Trump:

  • Use of divisive rhetoric, “making Brazil great again,” attacking the press.

"It’s like watching Donald Trump on crystal meth." — John Lee Anderson [09:48]

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4. Brazil’s Unreconciled Past with Military Rule

[10:46 – 12:39]

• Unlike Argentina and Chile, Brazil never confronted its military's past abuses. There has been “no real reckoning by the society.”
• Bolsonaro celebrates the military dictatorship’s “golden heyday,” stacking his cabinet with former generals.
  • His vice president: recently retired army general.
• Anderson flags this as “a kind of civic-military government unlike any we’ve seen.”

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5. The Trump/Bolsonaro Analogy and the Regional Implications

[12:39 – 15:32]

• Trump’s influence is palpable—Bolsonaro’s sons openly admire and meet with Steve Bannon.
• Regional polarization: left-wing populism rising in Mexico (AMLO) as a reaction to Trump; far-right in Brazil possibly emboldened by U.S. trends.
• Anderson warns of potential international fallout, highlighting tensions with Venezuela:
  • Bolsonaro has “suggested he might go to war with Venezuela,” and Trump’s own rhetoric could ignite confrontation.

“With Trump breathing heavily on that fire... I could see a situation in which he might wish to create a kind of regional consensus to do something about Venezuela, quote, unquote. Bolsonaro would be an obvious ally.” — John Lee Anderson [15:21]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Brazil’s Lawlessness:
  “This is a country that has never had effective rule of law... typically in these countries, 97% out of all murders go unsolved.” — John Lee Anderson [07:44]
• Comparing Bolsonaro to Trump:
  "It's like watching Donald Trump on crystal meth. But I really fear... that the kind of ability that Bolsonaro will have to revert the country to... where people are killed, tortured, disappeared, as we saw in the 70s and 80s, is about to happen again." — John Lee Anderson [09:48]
• On reckoning with the past:
  “There’s been no real reckoning by the society. And Bolsonaro, as a former military man throughout these last 30 years, has called for this kind of golden heyday in which everything was ordered and every Brazilian knew their place.” — John Lee Anderson [11:16]
• The risk of further regional instability:
  "With Venezuela collapsing and it being on the far left essentially, and Bolsonaro, Brazil, neighboring country being on the far right, we could begin to see beginning of collision between nations." — John Lee Anderson [14:49]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [02:07] Bolsonaro’s rhetoric and background
• [03:42] Transition from dictatorship to politics
• [05:16] The Latin American “Pink Tide” and Brazil’s political swing
• [07:44] Crime, insecurity, and the failure of the left
• [09:39] Bolsonaro modeling Trump’s tactics
• [10:46] Lack of accountability for Brazil’s military past
• [12:39] Trump’s regional influence and the risk of regional conflict

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Conclusion

John Lee Anderson delivers a sobering analysis of the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil as part of a wider right-wing populist movement, drawing clear parallels with Donald Trump’s political style and the global drift toward authoritarianism. He warns that Brazil’s fragile democratic institutions, compounded by unresolved historical wounds and severe inequality, may be at serious risk—not only to Brazilians but to the stability of the region as a whole.

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Transcript

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[Dorothy Wickenden]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, November 1st. I. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Last weekend in the elections in Brazil, the right wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro was elected president by a wide margin against his leftist opponent. Bolsonaro has called for the jailing of his political opponents, condones the torturing of criminals and derides women, Afro Brazilians and gays. John Lee Anderson joins me to discuss how Bolsonaro's right wing populism endangers democratic institutions in Brazil and how his victory has energized authoritarianism elsewhere in Latin America. John Lee, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

[John Lee Anderson]

Thanks Dorothy. Glad to be here.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I want to start by playing a clip from a speech that Bolsonaro gave.

[John Lee Anderson]

This is marginalus. Bolsonaro here is calling his political rival, that is everybody on the left, the people that have led the government of Brazil for most of the last 15 years, Red Bandits and says they will be banished from the homeland. You in other recent speeches he describes them as terrorists. Former President Lula, who is doing time now on a corruption charge he says will rot in jail. And he promises to see his opponent, Lula's successor, Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of Sao Paulo, into jail as well. He describes the pro land activists, environmentalists as terrorists and essentially promises a, you know, an iron hand and a clean sweep, using a kind of Cold War throwback language, which seems very much part of his discourse and has had extraordinary appeal in a country which has now voted him into office.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

You've known about him for a long time because you cover the region so closely. The rest of us haven't. Where does he come from? Who is he?

[John Lee Anderson]

He was a military officer at a time when Brazil was still under the military dictatorship. And right at the end of the military dictatorship, he left the military as a captain and went into Brazil's Congress, where he's been for the past 27 years. And in those 27 years, he's always been on the extremist margins of everything, periodically calling out for a restoration of the dictatorship, or in incidents, including one that was filmed about 15 years ago in which he roughly shoved a female lawmaker, called her a slut, and told her that she was not pretty enough to rape. And he recently revisited that language in another altercation with the same lawmaker. He's managed to speak ill of most of Brazil's minorities, blacks, gays. He's on the record as saying he'd rather see his son die than become gay. And so, you know, he's very far right. This is different to what we've seen elsewhere in Latin America in the past 30 years. I would say I've not seen anybody emerge on the political scene this radical since the latter days of the Cold War, in which you saw extremist anti communist characters making public speeches about the need to clean up the scourge of communism and disappear them and that kind thing.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Well, and you were covering the region in the 70s and 80s, when state sponsored terrorism was really common across the region. There was the dirty war in Argentina, the Somoza dictatorship, the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Pinochet junta. Then there was a swing to the left. What went wrong in Brazil with the left? Lula, whom you mentioned a few moments ago, was one of the most popular politicians in Brazil's history.

[John Lee Anderson]

That's exactly right. What we saw extraordinarily, you know, we had the end of dictatorship, by and large, at the end of the 80s and early 90s, along with the implosion of the Soviet Union. And the end of the cold war, we began to see laissez faire very often u. S backed democracies, sometimes very fragile, without much rule of law or institutionality. And then just around the time George w. Bush took office, we also saw the rise to power in Venezuela of Hugo Chavez, who veered to the left and fueled by the oil boom of the early 2000s. He essentially helped fuel and finance a rise in power to the left throughout the hemisphere. So it was what we now call the pink tide. Brazil too, you know, rose to a new status, economic and political status, on the energy boom of the same period. And suddenly we had Lula walking on the world stage. Some of us might remember the moment when president Obama hugged him on a stage the first time they met and said, I love this guy. And then suddenly, you know, the prices plummeted of oil. There was nothing else to sustain it. And then in the last five years, Brazil's standard of living has, you know, has, has dropped by half. Lula is now in prison. His successor was impeached.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Is that Dilma Rousseff?

[John Lee Anderson]

Dilma Rousseff. It was a huge turnaround in public sentiments because of a series of corruption scandals that began about five years ago. And the standard of living drug. And it does seem that that left wing wave was froth, you know, it's disappeared and is being replaced by, in the case of Venezuela, chaos, in the case of Brazil by this far right political wave led by Bolsonaro.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And how did Brazil come to have such an extraordinarily high murder rate?

[John Lee Anderson]

Well, this is a country that has never had effective rule of law in Brazil this last year. And I think we can make a definite link to the rise of Bolsonaro and his law and order message. You had 67 or 64,000 murders last year. It's about 180 Brazilians every day. You don't have effective follow through by judiciary. Typically in these countries, 97% out of all murders go unsolved. You have great police corruption as well. Very often they're part of the problem.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And huge racial inequities going back to slavery in Brazil.

[John Lee Anderson]

That's right. You have huge crime primarily deriving from this huge inequity between the haves and the have nots. And I think one of the great mistakes of the PT, the Workers Party, the left wing of these last 15 years has been their inability to, to grapple with the insecurity that most Brazilians feel and has turned them towards this, you know, to want an authoritarian leader it has to be said that while lula famously pulled 40 million or so Brazilians out of extreme poverty, he never dealt with properly the insecurity in the country. And so that's risen and risen and risen. And now you have the situation you have. So what I worry about, Dorothy, is that we're seeing this in a country without rule of law, without effective governability, and with huge inequities across its political landscape at the same time as we have Donald Trump in Washington. And it's obvious to all of us who've been watching that Bolsonaro has very closely scrutinized and watched and where he can emulated Trump's example, going on diatribes about the press and fake news, the.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Divisiveness, the make Brazil great again. We have the best in Brazil, the.

[John Lee Anderson]

Best on planet Earth, creating both internal and external enemies. It's like watching Donald Trump on crystal meth. But I really fear, and so do many people in Brazil and around Brazil, that the kind of ability that Bolsonaro will have to revert the country to the kind of China land, the kind of landscape where people are killed, tortured, disappeared, as we saw in the 70s and 80s, is about to happen again.

[David Remnick]

Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

It'S interesting, John Lee, that in Argentina and Chile there was a reckoning with the military sins of the past. Has that happened in Brazil?

[John Lee Anderson]

No, it is not. That is the other thing. Brazil is exceptional in many ways. Not only is it a vast continent sized country and it's of course Portuguese speaking, whereas the rest is Spanish speaking. Its borders are mostly jungle with its neighbors. So there's always been this kind of isolation of Brazil, but in the way it's dealt with its political legacy, the legacy of the dictatorship, it's also exceptional. You know, there was some back and forth in the other countries in terms of, you know, letting the military off and then finally going after them, forcing the military who carried out human rights abuses to face trial and also to apologize. That has not happened in Brazil. In Brazil, as I say, where the military ruled from 64 to 85, there were, you know, thousands of people imprisoned, tortured, only hundreds killed. It was a, it was a lower body count than in the other countries. But once it reverted to civilian rule, there was no look back. There's been no real reckoning by the society. And Bolsonaro, as a former military man throughout these last 30 years, has called for this kind of golden heyday in which everything was ordered and every Brazilian knew their place. And of course, already many of his cabinet picks are former generals and in some cases very recently, former generals. His vice presidential pick retired as a army general just this year. So we're looking at a kind of civic military government unlike any we've seen. Has to be said again, outside of Venezuela, where Chavez too brought many military guys into his government with the consequences we've seen.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

You mentioned Trump is an obvious analogy. And of course the United States has what we hope is a more stable democracy, although entire books have been written about the fragility even of our democracy and of other democracies. See this sort of rabid right contagion spreading in parts of Europe. And of course, the dangers are that much higher in Latin America, as you've just kind of outlined in Mexico. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a left wing populist, recently won the presidency with a strong anti Trump message. Is that the only country where we're.

[John Lee Anderson]

Seeing that right now? Yes, and I think in both cases we can say Trump has been a factor. Trump has been a factor in the rise of Bolsonaro. Sonato has three sons, by the way, who are in politics, one a senator, one city councillor, and one a congressman. And the one who's the congressman has already met with Steve Bannon, of course, and expressed his admiration for him. Bannon has reciprocated.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Trump himself has said his congratulations.

[John Lee Anderson]

Trump himself said his congratulations. There's clearly a kind of recognition of kindred soulship going on here. And by the same token, Lopez Obrador, the you mentioned in Mexico, owes his rise in turn largely to the Trump factor. You know, the blustering Trump in some ways earned his presidency on the back of his threats against Mexico and his vilification of Mexicans as these sort of criminal underclass pouring across the border. Lopez Obrador was seen as a kind of antidote to the humiliation that Mexicans felt subjected to every day by this despotic, loudmouthed American overseer. You know, Latin America has never effectively established its own political identity. In some ways that give Trump a little more time in affecting the political landscape. In Latin America and we could see, we could begin to see changes. This is one of my other fears is that with Venezuela collapsing and it being on the far left essentially, and Bolsonaro, Brazil, neighboring country being on the far right, we could begin to see beginning of collision between nations. Even Bolsonaro suggested that he might go to war with Venezuela in the final days of his presidency and then disavowed it the day he won. But with Trump breathing heavily on that fire in Venezuela and has been for months suggesting military options, I could see a situation in which he might wish to create a kind of regional consensus to do something about Venezuela, quote, unquote. Bolsonaro would be an obvious ally.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Well, on that sober note, thank you so much, John Lee.

[John Lee Anderson]

You're welcome, Dorothy.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

John Lee Anderson is a staff writer and the author of Che Guevara Revolutionary Life. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This podcast is produced by Alex Baron and Hannah Wilentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickend.

[John Lee Anderson]

Foreign.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's director of consumer Tech and Culture.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Katie Drummond]

At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech, right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[John Lee Anderson]

From PRX.