Categoria: Brasil

Capitalism at the End of Its Moral Imagination: A Gramscian Essay on Brasil, Communism and the Need for Systemic Transformation

The contemporary defence of capitalism often begins with a triumphal sentence: capitalism produces wealth. This may be true, but insufficient. A system must not be judged only by what it produces; it must be judged by what it concentrates, what it destroys, what it normalises, and what kind of human being it asks us to become in order to survive within it. Capitalism has produced abundance, but it has also produced a civilisation in which abundance is structurally separated from need. It has created technological splendour beside hunger, financial sophistication beside precarious labour, private luxury beside public exhaustion.

The central philosophical question, therefore, is not whether capitalism works. It clearly works for some. The question is whether it can still be morally defended as the organising principle of a society that claims to value dignity, democracy and human flourishing.

The communist argument begins precisely here: not as a nostalgic return to twentieth-century authoritarianism, but as a critique of the private appropriation of collective life. In Marx, capitalism is not merely an economy; it is a social relation in which labour produces value while capital captures it. In Karl Polanyi, the market society becomes intolerable because it turns land, labour and money into fictitious commodities, treating human beings and nature as if they existed primarily for exchange. In Nancy Fraser, capitalism survives by cannibalising the very spheres it depends on: care, ecology, public institutions and social reproduction. In David Harvey, capitalism is restless accumulation: it must expand, privatise, extract and urbanise, even when human need no longer requires it.

The result is not accidental inequality, but organised inequality.

Globally, the World Inequality Report 2026 states that the richest 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half of humanity owns only 2%. The same report notes that the poorest half captures less than 10% of global income. This is not a marginal imperfection; it is the architecture of the system. It means that billions of lives are lived downstream from decisions made by a tiny class whose power is not merely economic, but political, cultural and ecological.

Capitalism thus produces a paradox: the more productive society becomes, the less socially rational it appears. It is possible to produce enough food, yet tolerate hunger. It is possible to build hospitals, yet deny care. It is possible to educate every child, yet transform education into inherited advantage. It is possible to house people, yet preserve homelessness as a disciplinary spectacle. The communist critique insists that such contradictions are not failures of generosity, but failures of ownership.

I. Inequality as the Hidden Constitution of Capitalism

The first defect of contemporary capitalism is the concentration of income and wealth. Liberal theory often treats inequality as a tolerable side effect of freedom. But this is a philosophical deception. Extreme inequality does not merely distribute goods unequally; it distributes life chances, time, health, education, safety and political voice unequally.

Thomas Piketty’s historical work shows that, when capital accumulation is left largely unchecked, inherited wealth tends to grow faster than wages and productive growth. Pierre Bourdieu helps explain why this inequality reproduces itself beyond money: economic capital becomes cultural capital, educational advantage, confidence, taste, language, networks and legitimacy. The child of the elite does not inherit only property; they inherit the grammar of power.

Brasil is one of the clearest laboratories of this problem. Even after recent improvements, IBGE data show that Brasil’s Gini index for per capita household income remained at 0.504 in 2024; without social programme benefits, it would have risen to 0.542. In other words, the Brazilian state already prevents inequality from becoming even more obscene. The country is not poor because it lacks wealth; it is socially wounded because wealth is badly organised.

This is where communism makes philosophical sense. It refuses to treat redistribution as charity. It asks why the productive structure itself allows so much wealth to be privately captured in the first place. A communist horizon does not simply mean taxing the rich after inequality has been produced. It means democratising the institutions that produce wealth: land, credit, housing, infrastructure, technology, natural resources and strategic industries.

In capitalist society, redistribution is often treated as correction. In communist thought, equality must be built into production itself.

II. Crime, Violence and the Social Manufacture of Despair

A second defect of capitalism is its tendency to criminalise the consequences of its own exclusions. Societies that deny stable housing, dignified labour, education and social belonging then express astonishment when abandonment returns as violence. This does not mean every crime has a simple economic explanation. It means that crime is never merely individual. It is also spatial, historical and institutional.

Loïc Wacquant’s sociology of urban marginality is essential here. He shows how neoliberal states often withdraw social protection from poor territories while expanding penal control over those same territories. The state disappears as school, clinic, housing policy and labour guarantee, then reappears as police, prison and surveillance.

Brasil’s violence must be read through this lens. Ipea and the Brazilian Forum on Public Security reported 45,747 homicides in Brasil in 2023, a rate of 21.2 per 100,000 inhabitants; although this was the lowest rate in eleven years, the figures remain devastating, and the highest rates are concentrated in the North and Northeast.

Communism answers this not by romanticising crime, but by attacking its social conditions. A society organised around common welfare would treat violence prevention as housing policy, school policy, employment policy, mental health policy, urban policy and racial justice. The right-wing answer to crime is usually punishment after social collapse. The communist answer is the prevention of collapse itself.

This is not sentimentalism. The OECD has found that inequality has a negative and statistically significant impact on subsequent economic growth, partly because it damages human capital formation among people from poorer backgrounds. The IMF has also concluded that inequality is a robust determinant of both the pace and durability of growth, and that it is a mistake to “focus on growth and let inequality take care of itself.”

A society with less inequality is not only fairer. It is more stable, more intelligent, less violent and less wasteful.

III. Health and Education: The Moral Proof of Socialism Already Existing Inside Brasil

Brasil already contains, within its own institutions, fragments of a socialist moral order. The SUS is the clearest example. It is founded on the principle that health is not a commodity, but a universal right. According to Agência Brasil, 76% of Brazilians depend directly on the SUS, which conducts around 2.8 billion consultations per year. The Commonwealth Fund also describes Brasil’s SUS as a tax-funded universal system, free at the point of care, covering all residents and visitors.

This is philosophically decisive. When Brazilians defend the SUS, they are already defending a principle that contradicts pure capitalism. They are saying: life must not depend entirely on purchasing power.

The same applies to education. The OECD reports that Brazilian adults aged 25–64 with tertiary education earn, on average, 148% more than those with upper secondary education, far above the OECD average premium of 54%. This shows that education in Brasil is not merely a personal good; it is one of the central mechanisms through which class destiny is reproduced.

A communist perspective does not see education as training for the labour market alone. It sees education as the formation of free human beings capable of participating in collective life. Here Gramsci is fundamental. For him, every class that wishes to govern must produce its own intellectual and moral leadership. Education is not neutral; it is where society teaches people what is possible, what is respectable, what is “natural” and what must never be questioned.

The struggle for education, therefore, is also the struggle over common sense.

IV. War, Empire and the Capitalist Organisation of Fear

Capitalism also has an international form. It does not exist only as private enterprise within nations; it exists as competition between states, corporations, currencies, supply chains and military blocs. Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, despite their differences, both understood imperialism as connected to capital’s need for expansion. Immanuel Wallerstein later described capitalism as a world-system divided between core, semi-periphery and periphery, where wealth flows through unequal global structures.

War cannot be reduced to capitalism alone. Nationalism, religion, territory, ethnicity and state ambition all matter. But capitalism intensifies the material incentives for domination: resources, energy corridors, cheap labour, arms markets, reconstruction contracts, debt dependency and strategic control.

The scale of militarised irrationality is staggering. SIPRI reported that world military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of growth, with global spending up 41% over the decade from 2016 to 2025.

From a communist perspective, this is not merely a budgetary fact; it is a civilisational indictment. A world that can mobilise trillions for war but hesitates before universal sanitation, climate adaptation, food security and public health is not poor. It is politically deformed.

Communism proposes the replacement of competitive accumulation with planned sufficiency: production organised around need rather than profit, international cooperation rather than imperial hierarchy, and public investment rather than permanent militarisation.

V. How the Right Won the Cultural War in Brasil

To understand Brasil, however, one must not imagine power only as government. This is the core of Gramsci’s relevance. Gramsci argued that ruling classes do not govern by coercion alone. They govern through hegemony: intellectual and moral leadership that makes a particular social order appear natural, inevitable and commonsensical.

The Brazilian right did not gain strength merely through elections. It gained strength by occupying the imagination.

For decades, anti-communism was not presented only as an economic argument, but as a moral instinct. The left was associated with disorder, corruption, atheism, sexual threat, criminal leniency and national decline. Meanwhile, capitalism was translated into the language of family, merit, entrepreneurship, religious virtue, security and individual effort.

This is Gramsci in practice: the transformation of class interest into common sense.

Brazilian media concentration helped form this terrain. The Media Ownership Monitor found that five families controlled 26 of the 50 media outlets with the largest audiences in Brasil, with Grupo Globo alone holding nine of them and reaching an audience larger than the second, third, fourth and fifth largest groups combined. Such concentration does not mean every journalist or outlet is ideologically identical, but it does mean that the symbolic infrastructure of public debate has long been narrow, elite-centred and commercially organised.

Religion also became a decisive field of hegemony. Brasil remains religiously plural, but the 2022 Census data show a major shift: Catholics fell to 56.7%, while Evangelicals rose to 26.9%. This transformation cannot be treated with contempt. Many Evangelical churches provide community, discipline, care, music, language, welfare and belonging in places where the secular state has often arrived late or not at all. But conservative political actors learned to translate economic anxiety into moral panic, and moral panic into electoral discipline.

More recently, digital networks accelerated this process. Studies on Brasil show that WhatsApp became a key infrastructure for political disinformation, including during the rise of Bolsonarism, and research on the 8 January Brasília attack found attempts to manufacture consensus in public WhatsApp groups around anti-democratic narratives.

The contemporary Brazilian right, then, did not simply defend capitalism. It disguised capitalism beneath resentment. It converted economic suffering into hatred of teachers, feminists, artists, Black movements, LGBTQIA+ people, environmentalists, public servants and the poor themselves. As recent Gramscian analysis of Bolsonarism argues, cultural conservatism, anti-globalism, nationalism and conspiracy theory have helped preserve a neoliberal economic agenda by shifting attention away from political economy and towards moral threat.

VI. A Gramscian Route for Brasil

A Gramscian “turn” for Brasil cannot be imagined as a sudden seizure of the state followed by decrees from above. That would misunderstand both Brasil and Gramsci. In complex modern societies, Gramsci distinguishes between a war of manoeuvre and a war of position. A war of manoeuvre is frontal rupture. A war of position is slower, deeper and cultural: the construction of a new historical bloc capable of leading society before it governs it.

For a country like Brasil — continental, unequal, religious, racially stratified, institutionally dense and culturally plural — the communist route would need to be democratic, constitutional, pedagogical and material.

First, it would need to rebuild common sense. The left cannot speak only in administrative language: programmes, budgets, acronyms, ministries. It must produce a moral vocabulary capable of competing with the right’s simplicity. It must say, repeatedly and concretely, that hunger is not fate, rent is not destiny, illness is not a market opportunity, and poverty is not proof of personal failure.

Second, it must form organic intellectuals. For Gramsci, organic intellectuals are not merely professors or writers; they are organisers of feeling and meaning. In Brasil, they would have to emerge from schools, unions, churches, neighbourhood associations, cultural movements, universities, health workers, delivery workers, domestic workers, public servants, artists, pastors, mães de santo, favela leaders, small farmers and digital creators. The point is not propaganda in the crude sense. The point is democratic pedagogy: helping people name the structures that injure them.

Third, the left must stop treating culture as decorative. Culture is infrastructure. Music, television, memes, literature, sport, religion, humour, schools and neighbourhood rituals shape political possibility long before manifestos do. A communist project in Brasil would need popular media, community journalism, public digital platforms, cultural funding outside elite circuits, and a language that does not humiliate ordinary conservatism but patiently separates legitimate moral anxiety from authoritarian manipulation.

Fourth, the economic programme must be concrete enough to touch daily life. It should include progressive taxation of income, wealth, dividends and inheritance; expansion of public housing; universal full-time public education; strengthening of the SUS; public control over strategic infrastructure; green industrial planning; land reform where socially and environmentally justified; incentives for worker cooperatives; public banking for development; and democratic planning mechanisms at municipal, state and federal levels.

Fifth, crime must be removed from the monopoly of the punitive imagination. A communist-inspired security policy would combine intelligence against organised crime with investment in schools, urban infrastructure, employment, drug policy reform, mental health, prison reform and police accountability. The goal would not be naïve pacifism, but the end of the social production of disposable populations.

Sixth, the project must defend democracy more seriously than liberalism has defended it. This means plural parties, free elections, independent courts, press freedom, anti-corruption mechanisms, transparency, participatory budgeting, social councils and constitutional guarantees. A Brazilian communism worthy of the twenty-first century cannot be authoritarian; it must be more democratic than capitalism, or it will deserve to fail.

Seventh, it must construct a new historical bloc. In Brasil, this bloc cannot be only the industrial working class in the classical European sense. It must include informal workers, app drivers, care workers, teachers, nurses, Black and Indigenous movements, women, favela residents, progressive religious communities, small entrepreneurs crushed by monopolies, family farmers, environmentalists and the precarious middle class. Its unifying principle would be simple: no one should have to live permanently afraid in order for others to accumulate without limit.

Conclusion: Communism as the Name of an Unfinished Moral Demand

The case for communism today is not that history has given us a perfect model. It has not. The twentieth century offers warnings as well as hopes. Any serious communist argument must recognise the dangers of bureaucracy, repression, party absolutism and state idolatry.

But the failures committed in the name of communism do not absolve capitalism of its present violence.

Capitalism continues to ask society to accept hunger amid abundance, loneliness amid connectivity, ecological breakdown amid technological brilliance, and obscene wealth amid preventable misery. It tells us that there is no alternative, which is always the sentence spoken by systems that fear being imagined beyond.

Gramsci teaches that political transformation begins before government. It begins when a society stops mistaking domination for common sense. Brasil’s future will not be changed only by winning elections. It will be changed by rebuilding the moral imagination of the country: by making solidarity appear practical, equality appear intelligent, public goods appear sacred, and exploitation appear as archaic as monarchy.

Communism, at its strongest, is not merely a doctrine of the state. It is the insistence that human beings are not born to be managed as costs, ranked as competitors and abandoned as failures. It is the claim that the wealth of a society belongs, in the deepest sense, to those who produce and sustain it.

And in a country like Brasil — so vast, so wounded, so inventive, so accustomed to surviving what should have been politically unacceptable — that claim is not an abstraction. It is perhaps the beginning of a new common sense.

The Gospel and the Guillotine of Indifference

A Chronicle of Convenient Christendom

There are days in Brasil when the morning headlines feel like parables rewritten by the wrong disciples — stories where virtue is loudly proclaimed and quietly abandoned, where the name of Christ is invoked like a campaign slogan, and where the gospel is wielded not as a moral compass but as a cudgel. One might call it hypocrisy, but even that word seems too gentle for the scale of the dissonance.

Some days the sun seems almost accusatory, illuminating everything with an honesty no one asked for. On such a day, I sat with Dilexi te on Love for the Poor open on my lap, as if it were a lantern in the middle of a fog that our politics insist on thickening. Pope Leo XIV writes as one who has walked among the poor, not above them. He speaks of structural sin, of systems that grind the faces of the vulnerable until they forget they were ever children of god.

Brasil’s contemporary right wing—whether dressed in the corporate suits of the União Brasil, the punitive rhetoric of PL, or the nostalgia-soaked moralism of Republicanos — moves through public life like a procession of pharisees convinced they alone possess divine authority. Yet their actions betray them at every turn.

They demand obedience to scripture while ignoring its first lesson: compassion.

They praise the sanctity of life while defending policies that routinely abandon living, breathing human beings.

They speak of family while endorsing economic structures that grind families into precarity.

It is a theatre of selective morality — one in which Jesus is constantly quoted, yet rarely followed.

The Poverty of Mercy

Consider the passionate speeches about protecting the poor delivered by politicians who vote consistently against welfare expansion, against food assistance, against housing programmes, and in favour of regressive tax structures that place the heaviest burdens precisely on those Christ identified as his own. If Christ is the shepherd, the brasilian right often behaves like hired hands who, seeing the wolf of poverty approach, simply shut the door and retreat into gated communities.

The PL’s relentless push for austerity, presented as fiscal responsibility, reads more like an extended footnote to the biblical story of the rich young ruler — except in this version, the ruler not only refuses to give up his wealth but also demands that the poor surrender theirs as well.

The Cult of Vengeance

Christianity teaches forgiveness, mercy, the dignity of every human soul. Yet one finds among the right a fixationv — bordering on obsession — with punitive policing, harsher sentencing, and a fantasy of righteous violence. As if Christ, confronted with the adulterous woman, would have ordered the first stone to be thrown with military precision and broadcast on national television.

The law-and-order rhetoric of parties like Republicanos and figures aligned with the evangelical bloc is not a defence of justice but a performance of power. It sanctifies brutality, canonises the police bullet, and declares entire communities unworthy of redemption. When the children of favelas are treated as collateral damage, and when politicians respond with statistical shrugs, one sees not christianity but its grotesque inversion.

Mammon’s Most Faithful Servants

The gospel could not be clearer: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”
Yet in the brasilian right, Mammon appears not only served but enthroned.

The alliance between right-wing parties and extractive industries — agribusiness, mining conglomerates, and deforestation giants — would make even the golden calf blush. Environmental destruction is justified with a theological flair: god, they say, “gave us the land to use,” conveniently forgetting that he did not instruct humankind to pillage it to exhaustion.

The ruralista bloc prays loudly on sunday only to vote on monday for everything that accelerates environmental collapse and undermines indigenous survival. They claim stewardship; they practise exploitation.

The Gospel According to the Market

Jesus expelled the money-changers from the temple; the brasilian right invites them back with tax incentives.
The neoliberal creed — repeated like a litany by sectors of Novo, União Brasil, and the corporate wing of the right — declares that the market will heal all wounds. But the market has never healed a wound; it merely calculates its profitability.

And still they insist that privatisation is salvation, deregulation is redemption, and austerity is good news for the poor — though only the poor are ever asked to sacrifice.

If Christ multiplied bread and fish, the modern right atomises it, repackages it through private intermediaries, and sells it back with high interest.

A Christ Retrofitted for Power

Perhaps the most audacious act is the political renovation of Jesus himself.
The carpenter of Nazareth, who walked among the marginalised, is repurposed as a nationalist icon; the pacifist prophet becomes a mascot for gun culture; the agitator against empire is recast as a defender of authoritarian strongmen.

It is a theological manoeuvre so cynical it borders on artistry.

The bolsonarista wing in particular has perfected this tactic: turning faith into branding, liturgy into propaganda, pastors into political technicians. In their hands, christianity becomes less a spiritual tradition and more a marketing franchise — its product line including outrage, fear, and the constant promise of moral superiority.

The Chronicle’s Closing Note

One need not be christian to recognise the tragedy. It is literary, almost Shakespearean: a cast of characters convinced they are protagonists of a divine narrative, failing to notice that they are the antagonists in their own story.

They speak of Christ with patriotic fervour, but when confronted with his actual teachings, they behave like officials inspecting forged documents. This Christ is inconvenient, they seem to say. Let us remodel him.

And so they do.

They craft a Christ who hates precisely the people the historical Jesus embraced.
A Christ who blesses militias, applauds evictions, and nods approvingly at environmental plunder.
A Christ who resembles not the saviour of the gospels but the leaders who invoke his name.

It is not merely hypocrisy.
It is heresy disguised as patriotism.
A chronicle of moral dissonance so loud it drowns out the very Gospel they claim to protect.

And the irony is almost biblical:
in trying to claim Christ for themselves, they have wandered farther from him than they dare admit.

The bible warns that we will know a tree by its fruits.
The fruits of compassion, dignity, and solidarity are more abundant among those who seek to lift the poor, rather than blame them.

Perhaps, one day, under a gentler sun, the two rivers — faith and politics — may finally merge. But only if we acknowledge the distance between Christ’s words and the policies of those who most claim to speak in his name.

The Pedagogy of Becoming: Paulo Freire and the Crisis of Consciousness in Contemporary Brasil

In the present hour of Brasilian education, Paulo Freire’s voice resounds like a distant thunder — familiar, yet increasingly ignored by those who govern the nation’s schools. His vision of conscientização, the awakening of critical consciousness, has never been more necessary, nor more endangered. The new model of secondary education — ostensibly designed to offer “flexibility” and “career readiness” — reveals itself instead as a quiet betrayal of Freire’s emancipatory dream. Under the rhetoric of modernisation lies a pedagogy of resignation, one that trains rather than educates, conditions rather than liberates.

Freire taught that education is never neutral. It either domesticates or humanises; it either reproduces the world as it is or transforms it through dialogue and reflection. The restructured Ensino Médio, with its utilitarian emphasis on “skills”, “employability”, and “efficiency”, signals a shift from formation to function, from thought to task. The student ceases to be a subject of knowledge and becomes a consumer of competencies. It is, in essence, the banking model of education reborn in neoliberal attire.

This quiet transformation parallels Antonio Gramsci’s warning about cultural hegemony: the ruling class need not impose ideology by force if it can shape the curriculum. The promise of “choice” within the new system — allowing students to select “itineraries” of study — conceals an absence of real agency. How can one choose freely when the horizon of possibilities has already been narrowed by economic necessity? As Hannah Arendt once observed, “education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” Yet the new educational order loves only productivity, not the world.

In this new landscape, philosophy, sociology, and arts — the disciplines that teach students to question, to imagine, to dissent — are increasingly marginalised, framed as luxuries for the few. What remains is a curriculum stripped of doubt, designed to produce compliance in the name of adaptability. Here, Freire’s pedagogy of hope meets its antagonist: a pedagogy of market logic, where dialogue is replaced by metrics and the word “critical” is quietly excised from the vocabulary of learning.

Freire’s insight that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” feels subversive again. In a society fractured by misinformation and social inequality, the cultivation of critical consciousness is not a privilege — it is a form of resistance. The new Ensino Médio threatens to extinguish this resistance at its root, converting schools into training grounds for precarious futures. Students are told they are free to choose, yet they are not free to think deeply about why their choices exist in the first place.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to be free” — that freedom carries with it the burden of responsibility and reflection. The contemporary educational system, however, seeks to relieve students of this burden, offering instead the comfort of superficial certainty. It trades the existential struggle for meaning for a checklist of competencies. It replaces Freire’s dialogical encounter with the algorithmic logic of standardised assessment.

And yet, beneath this mechanisation, the human hunger for meaning persists. In classrooms across Brasil, teachers — often underpaid, undervalued, yet profoundly committed — continue to create small revolutions of thought. They invite students to speak, to question, to name the world. These moments of resistance recall Freire’s belief that education is an act of love, and that love, in its truest form, is revolutionary.

The crisis of Brasilian education is therefore not merely pedagogical — it is ontological. It reflects a broader societal fear of genuine thinking, a preference for obedience over awareness. Freire warned that the oppressed internalise the logic of their oppressors; now, perhaps, the students of Brasil are being taught to internalise the logic of the market. Against this tide, the Freirean project remains a radical affirmation of humanity: that to educate is to believe in the capacity of every person to read the world, not merely to navigate it.

If Brasil’s future is to be more than efficient—if it is to be just, conscious, and alive—it must return to the difficult art of dialogue, the courage of reflection, and the dream of a pedagogy that teaches not what to think, but how to think. Only then will Freire’s vision cease to be a memory and become once more a movement.

Maria Maria: Fragments for a Country Still Waiting

This text refers to the following song and is a historical and interpretative analysis.

Maria Maria cannot be understood solely through its lyrics or melody. To truly appreciate it, one must consider the silence between the words and the historical context in which that silence was formed.


Brazil, 1978. The country was breathing with borrowed lungs. Although the dictatorship was slowly decomposing, it still ruled the pace of public and private conversations. Although there was a promise of “opening up” it was made by those who held the keys to the door and reserved the right to open it at their own pace.

In this atmosphere, singing about the lives of working women was a political act in itself, though not in the inflammatory sense that the word ‘political’ would later take on. It was political because it restored dignity to ordinary life, which did not make the headlines. Official history dealt with presidents and generals, but Milton Nascimento sang about what history never wrote about: tired bodies, persistent voices and resilient tenderness.

What fascinates me is that “Maria Maria” is not built on the idea of victory or defeat. It describes a permanent state of living in spite of. This condition — living in spite — does not fit well with the logic of progress because it implies that time is not taking us to a better place; it is merely moving us around. When sung, the song denounces this circular displacement: a Brazil that changes decades, currencies and governments, yet preserves the same daily efforts of the Marias intact.

In 1978, Maria woke up before sunrise, travelled across the city on crowded buses, worked all day and returned home when the streets were empty again. She heard “Maria Maria” on the radio for the first time and wondered if the song was about her or if she herself, without realising it, had inspired it. In 2025, another Maria — with a different face, accent and transport app — repeats the same journey. Perhaps she has headphones or perhaps she listens to the radio, but she has the same feeling that life demands a strength that she has not been given and that she must invent day after day.

The line that connects these two Marias is not one of progress, but of survival. In between, there have been direct elections, impeachment, redemocratisation, globalisation, the internet, and promises of inclusion and labour reforms. But at the core of the experience, nothing essential has changed: the relationship with work is still shaped by physical necessity and the discipline of the body, and by resistance to fatigue.

I think that, in the late 1970s, there was a kind of collective fatigue in the country. It was not the exhaustion of those about to collapse, but of those who had already become accustomed to hardship. In 2025, fatigue goes by other names — burnout, emotional exhaustion and depression — but the essence remains the same: a body that keeps going because it cannot stop.

Time reveals itself here as a cruel trick: it advances, changing the landscape and replacing those in power, yet preserving the weight on our shoulders intact. This is why “Maria Maria” sounds like a mirror that refuses to age today. When listening to the song, one does not feel nostalgia, but discomfort; the realisation that the song belongs not to a particular time, but to time itself.

In this sense, memory is ambiguous. For Maria in 1978, remembering was an act of resistance: keeping the names of her factory comrades, muffled cries and songs sung in low voices to avoid attracting attention. For the Maria of 2025, however, remembering can also be a burden, as she realises that the dreams she inherited were partly illusory and that reality requires not only persistence but also reinvention.

Democracy has fulfilled some of its promises over the decades: freedom of expression, periodic elections and the right to protest. However, for Maria, who counts her coins at the end of the month, democracy is not a daily experience, but rather a distant concept. It is as if freedom had been distributed in the form of language, but not in the form of time or rest.

This is why Maria’s story remains an undated chronicle. Its setting is the space between two breaths — the moment when the body remembers that it is alive but also that it must keep moving. What Milton perhaps unwittingly captured was the fact that, when prolonged for decades, resistance ceases to be a conscious action and becomes part of the definition of being.

The most disturbing thing is that even when we are free to speak, we still speak softly. The habit of protecting oneself from power does not disappear with decrees or constitutions. It lodges itself in gestures, in tone of voice and in the way we avert our eyes. Perhaps that is why, more than forty years later, Maria Maria still seems to have been written yesterday: because the country has changed its clothes, but not its skin.

The lyrics, in their original form and in free translation, can be found here

portuguese

english


Maria Maria, é um dom, uma certa magia
Uma força que nos alerta
Uma mulher que merece viver e amar
Como outra qualquer do planeta

Maria Maria, é o som, é a cor, é o suor
É a dose mais forte e lenta
De uma gente que ri quando deve chorar
E não vive, apenas aguenta

Mas é preciso ter força, é preciso ter raça
É preciso ter gana sempre
Quem traz no corpo a marca
Maria, Maria, mistura a dor e a alegria

Mas é preciso ter manha, é preciso ter graça
É preciso ter sonho sempre
Quem traz na pele essa marca
Possui a estranha mania de ter fé na vida

Mas é preciso ter força, é preciso ter raça
É preciso ter gana sempre
Quem traz no corpo a marca
Maria, Maria, mistura a dor e a alegria

Mas é preciso ter manha, é preciso ter graça
É preciso ter sonho sempre
Quem traz na pele essa marca
Possui a estranha mania de ter fé na vida

Maria Maria, is a gift, a kind of magic

A force that alerts us

A woman who deserves to live and love

Like any other on the planet

Maria Maria, is the sound, the colour, the sweat

It’s the strongest and slowest dose

Of a people who laugh when they should cry

And don’t live, just endure

But you have to have strength, you have to have spirit

You have to always have desire

Those who bear the mark on their bodies

Maria, Maria, mix pain and joy

But you have to be clever, you have to be graceful

You have to always have dreams

Those who bear this mark on their skin

Have the strange habit of having faith in life

But you have to have strength, you have to have spirit

You always have to have desire

Those who bear the mark on their bodies

Maria, Maria, mix pain and joy

But you have to be clever, you have to be graceful

You always have to have dreams

Those who bear this mark on their skin

Have the strange habit of having faith in life

Read a short story inspired by the song

Maria Maria — Two Times, the Same Body

The damp, early-morning wind blows through the cracks in the shack, mingling with the scents of burnt coffee and wet clay. Maria wakes up before sunrise, feeling the weight of years of unseen effort bearing down on her. Her arms ache, her body is weighed down by memories and fatigue, and her chest is burdened by silent guilt: her children are still asleep, and the time that should be theirs will be taken up by others. She puts on her apron, adjusts the bag of clothes to iron, and crosses the muddy street, feeling the difference between the two worlds beneath her feet. On one side are shacks and barefoot children; on the other are tall houses with iron gates, closed curtains and armed security, exuding an air of cold order and control.

Upon entering her employer’s kitchen, Maria is hit by a mixture of scents: coffee, wax, cleaning products and perfume. Her every gesture is measured and her every step is observed. She watches her employer’s children grow up — every laugh, every discovery, every achievement — and she feels the weight of her own absence. Meanwhile, her own children, left in the care of neighbours or relatives, grow up in silence, learning to cope with her absence. At that moment, a silent question arises: what justice is there in a country that consumes some people’s time to sustain the lives of others? The strength required for invisible work is not heroism, but obligation. The song on the radio — You Have to Be Strong — sounds almost ironic, reminding Maria that the lives of women like her are measured by the service they provide, never by their own existence.

Memory mixes with the perception of the present. She remembers the dictatorship: constant repression, surveillance, silent fear and censorship permeating newspapers, radio and books. While the country grew economically for some, the majority remained invisible, deprived of opportunities, education and a voice. Domestic work, almost exclusively performed by women and black people, was a space of silent domination. Maria wonders: does the freedom promised by the country only exist in official speeches? Is there any value in democracy if time is stolen from people to fulfil the functions of others?

When she goes out to catch the bus, she is overwhelmed by the stifling heat, the mingled odours of sweat and cheap perfume, and the jostling of fellow passengers. She observes the other women around her, all of whom appear similar and carry the same invisibility. Another natural and inevitable question arises: if freedom is a right, how can it be guaranteed when one is forced to exist for another? When the time that should be spent with one’s family is consumed by the work of others?


Decades later, in 2025, life repeats itself in another form. Maria, still young with small children, makes her way to the upper-middle-class apartments with her backpack on her back, her shoes changed and her apron clean. The smell of alcohol, cleaning products and expensive perfume surrounds her. Children run through the corridors demanding attention, and Maria realises that the weight of the past has not lifted: the silent demand persists. She thinks of her own children, growing up under outsourced care and learning to cope with her absence. The music plays in her headphones: You have to have grace — Maria smiles, but it is an ironic and aware smile: grace and strength continue to define her existence, while real freedom remains out of reach.


Brazil has formally changed: there are elections, freedom of the press and a democratic constitution. But the mechanisms that perpetuate inequality remain: poor education for some, elite schools for others; limited public healthcare, with private access denied to many; unequal housing; and a lifetime consumed by the need to survive. Maria realises that political freedom is merely a façade and that her children are still denied her presence, affection and time.

Every daily gesture, every piece of clothing washed and every meal prepared is also an ethical and conscious act. Resistance is not heroism; it is a silent obligation to exist in a world that renders bodies and experiences invisible. Maria understands that life is measured not only in days and years, but also in consciousness: in perceiving injustice, reflecting on memory, inequality, absence and resistance.


As she watches her children sleeping on the bus seat at the end of the day, Maria feels that there is something more; something that does not change. The invisible yet firm line that connects 1978 to 2025 crosses generations. The two Marias do not recognise each other in their faces, but in the way they carry time, in the weight of absence and the silent presence that persists despite everything. The song “Maria Maria” is not just a song; it is a thread that spans decades, recording memory, resistance, restrained love, and critical awareness.


Then, in a sudden, almost poetic realisation, Maria understands that life, with all its injustices, is not just suffering. It is also the music that crosses time, the memory that refuses to fade and the moment when she breathes and realises that she exists, even if she is invisible. Amidst the scents of coffee and clay, the feel of fabric and the breathing of her children, there is an intimate, secret space where strength and grace converge, where Maria is finally complete, even if the world remains imperfect. Existence is an act of resistance and consciousness, and at the same time, living literature — written in time, in the body, and in silence; that which persists despite everything.





The north winds don’t move windmills

Os ventos do norte
Não movem moinhos
E o que me resta
É só um gemido

Minha vida, meus mortos
Meus caminhos tortos
Meu sangue latino
Minh’alma cativa

Rompi tratados
Traí os ritos
Quebrei a lança
Lancei no espaço
Um grito, um desabafo

E o que me importa
É não estar vencido


Sangue Latino, Ney Matogrosso

It is therefore unsurprising that Trump should advocate for Brazil to once again become the United States’ backyard. In order to ensure this, the country has been responsible for causing political and economic instability in Brazil since at least the 1950s. This can be verified in official US government documents that have been declassified.

Brazil possesses a number of strategic resources, including rare minerals and metals (utilised in the manufacture of high-strength alloys for military, aerospace and energy industries), oil and gas, and agricultural products (for which Brazil is a key player in the global chain). In addition, the country has water resources and biodiversity, as evidenced by the Amazon rainforest and the Guarani aquifer (which, in addition to the resources themselves, are also fundamental to the planet’s climate and environmental regulation).

Moreover, Brazil stands as the most expansive nation in Latin America, boasting an extensive coastline along the South Atlantic, a region of paramount importance due to its strategic significance for commercial and military routes. The Brazilian coastline is also subject to the jurisdiction of exclusive maritime economic zones, which extend over strategic resources such as offshore oil.

At this juncture, it is reasonable to hypothesise that the interference and sabotage perpetrated by the US is intended to facilitate the acquisition of strategic assets, with a particular emphasis on the rare earths recently discovered in Minas Gerais.

The deliberate orchestration of an economic crisis serves as a pivotal catalyst for the initiation of forced privatisations, which in turn facilitate the unregulated entry of historically protected sectors, including but not limited to energy, mining, and infrastructure. During the 1990s, strategic sectors were privatised due to the implementation of neoliberal reforms and the involvement of foreign capital, notably from the United States.

Furthermore, it is important to highlight the US interest in weakening BRICS, which has emerged as a strong economic bloc, possibly surpassing other free trade areas.

The utilisation of historical evidence in conjunction with official documents from the US government facilitates the reconstruction of a chronology:

1950 – mid-1963: The Cold War
In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the United States began to perceive Latin America as a region susceptible to communist expansion. The United States employed political support and the influence of local elites to finance business groups, thereby exerting economic pressure through credit and trade policies. In this manner, the US established itself as a significant influence on the Brazilian political and military elites.

1964: The overthrow of President João Goulart by a military coup d’état

The US ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, transmitted a confidential communication to the US government, articulating grave concerns regarding the government of João Goulart and proposing specific actions:

It is evident that President Goulart is collaborating with the Brazilian Communist Party with the objective of ‘seizing dictatorial power’. Furthermore, it is recommended that ‘a clandestine delivery of arms’ be made available to Branco’s supporters, in addition to a shipment of gas and oil, with a view to facilitating the success of the coup forces. It is imperative to prepare without delay for the possibility of overt intervention at a subsequent stage.

The declassification of documents has provided insights into Operation Brother Sam, a military plan devised by the American military to provide support for the overthrow of the Brazilian government by military means. This operation involved the deployment of naval vessels and aircraft that were prepared for immediate deployment.

The Operation Brother Sam deployment comprised the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, six destroyers, four tankers, seven C-135 aircraft, fighter jets, weapons and ammunition. However, the opposition military in Brazil swiftly deposed the Goulart government, thereby rendering the operation ineffective in Brazil.

The US government provided overt political support to the military and played an active role in the provision of information and signalling immediate recognition of the coup regime. Furthermore, the US government offered indirect support in the form of logistics. According to materials compiled by the National Security Archive and the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), leaders in Washington worked to “facilitate” the success of the coup.

1964–1985: The consolidation of the dictatorship and the acts of sabotage against communism

The Mann Doctrine (1926) established pragmatic criteria: the tolerance of pro-American dictators and the combatting of communists. It was officially advised that the nature of regimes should not be a subject of inquiry; rather, support should be extended to those regimes which were aligned with US interests.

The policy in question stipulated a non-interventionist approach towards dictators, provided they demonstrated a favourable disposition towards US business interests. Conversely, it called for intervention against Communists, irrespective of their specific policies. In addition, it is important to note that: US operatives interpreted the Mann Doctrine of 18 March as a ‘green light’ for the coup to proceed.

The military regime established repressive institutions and aligned itself with the anti-communist agenda of the US. In the 1970s, South American dictatorships collaborated in transnational repression operations, which came to be known as Operation Condor. The operation was facilitated by the complicity of local services and, to varying degrees, by support and information circulating through channels aligned with the US government.

In this particular context, interventions did not invariably take the form of military action; rather, they encompassed economic boycotts, withdrawal and conditioning of credit, and support for campaigns by entities that served to weaken nationalist governments. It is evident that opposition organisations were financed, and pressure was exerted on capital flows, thereby strengthening the destabilisation of governments considered “dangerous” by Washington.

A review of historical evidence reveals the existence of campaign financing and think tanks, in addition to diplomatic actions aimed at isolating governments that did not align with the regime stipulated by the US.

The late 1990s to 2010 period: The influence has undergone a process of attenuation, yet it remains an ever-present phenomenon, exerting its influence through the medium of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and think tanks

In the context of redemocratisation, the US succeeded in consolidating its influence through a variety of channels, including diplomatic and institutional mechanisms (with a particular emphasis on military, technological and educational cooperation). Additionally, private actors such as NGOs and think tanks played a significant role in propagating doctrines imported from Washington. This influence functioned as a template for the political and economic environment, albeit in a more discreet manner than during the years of military dictatorship, yet always in a pervasive way.

2011–2016: The present study will examine the government of Dilma Rousseff and the onset of a political crisis

The political agenda of Dilma Rousseff (PT) was characterised by the implementation of policies aimed at promoting social expansion and the resumption of South-South cooperation. The crisis that led to impeachment (2015–2016) had complex internal causes, including a deteriorating economy, corruption scandals (Operation Car Wash), the breakdown of coalition bases, and strong political polarisation. It is evident that prominent figures within the Car Wash judicial apparatus have been observed to engage in collaborative endeavours with the US government, with the objective of subverting the political agenda of the Dilma administration.

It is evident that a number of researchers and analysts (including, it is worth noting, a “long coup“) have documented the fact that a section of the 2015–2016 process combined internal action (in the media, the Attorney General’s Office and Congress) with disinformation and the fomenting of protests. Furthermore, a number of studies and articles argue that there was also external influence (exchange of information, support from transnational conservative networks, training of political movements).

Nevertheless, the evidence of direct intervention by Washington to force impeachment is less compelling than in the case of 1964. The impeachment was primarily the result of internal right-wing actors, with the echo of international right-wing networks and actors.

It is crucial to emphasise the manner in which transnational media networks and conservative groups that are opposed to governments with populist agendas, such as those that were in power during the PT years, have amplified alleged scandals.

2016–2018: Long coup and rise of the right

Recent research describes a prolonged process (media discourse, judicialisation, leaks, and reputation operations) that paved the way for extreme polarisation and the rise to power of radical right-wing candidates in 2018. There are academic works and journalistic investigations that document connections between Brazilian conservative networks and international actors (consultancies, digital platforms, influencers), which were decisive in constructing anti-PT narratives. The literature debates how much of this articulation was an external initiative versus an internal opportunity. Figures such as Steve Bannon were decisive in the election results, as was the adoption of communication strategies inspired by Trumpism.

2018–2022: The worst possible president and the most abject person on the planet come to power

Jair Bolsonaro won the 2018 elections largely through a campaign that exploited digital networks, influencers, and an anti-establishment platform. During and after the campaign, there were visible contacts with figures from the conservative/alt-right political environment in the US (e.g., Steve Bannon and ideological allies) and rhetorical alignment with the Trump administration. This transnational network encouraged communication strategies, framing, and allegations of electoral “fraud,” as well as symbolic and image support.

2022–2025 — Post-Bolsonaro defeat, flight from the country, accusations and international pressure
After losing in 2022, Bolsonaro was the target of investigations in Brazil (linked to attempts to destabilise the 2022 electoral process and plans for a coup). Part of the Bolsonaro family and allies fled seeking shelter and coordination abroad (including the US), seeking political and legal support.

Journalistic sources document meetings and attempts to influence US authorities to pressure the Brazilian government against legal proceedings in favour of Bolsonaro. In 2025, there was a clear escalation in the Trump administration’s actions regarding the Bolsonaro case: President Trump insulted the Brazilian judicial process, classified the investigations against Bolsonaro as “persecution,” sanctioned or threatened measures (punitive tariffs on Brazilian imports, sanctions against Brazilian authorities involved in Bolsonaro’s trial), and denounced the actions of judges as politically motivated. (Sources: Reuters, Washington Post, Financial Times, Guardian, and official White House documents/communiqués).

Journalistic investigations and contemporary reports show that members of the Bolsonaro family (notably Eduardo Bolsonaro) have maintained direct contact with officials and advisers in the US, seeking to persuade the American government to intervene — for example, by suggesting sanctions against Brazilian judges and encouraging measures such as tariff increases in retaliation for judicial decisions in Brazil. Reports have attributed to Eduardo the role of “bridge” to the Trump administration to obtain external pressure against the Brazilian judiciary. These actions have been interpreted by critics as clear attempts to influence Brazilian national sovereignty, using the power of another state to interfere in internal processes. There are also public statements and posts by family members favouring American measures.

In contemporary Brazil, the Bolsonaro family and their supporters are regarded as emblematic of the nation’s prevailing socio-political challenges. They are often accused of engaging in corrupt practices, betraying their principles, and prioritising their own agendas over the broader interests of the nation.

The present situation can be likened to a state of waiting, in which the only action available is to observe the progression of the legal proceedings. It is hoped that the results of the 2026 elections will be a more accurate reflection of the will of the Brazilian people, and that they will be less influenced by external factors, such as those emanating from Washington.

As the march that is poised to be the highlight of the 2026 carnival asserts, on a free translation:


You can raise taxes,
You can kick and scream,
You can send letters,
You can threaten,
Here you don't call the shots
Here we are tough
We eat oranges
We burn fascists!
O Trumpi, salva meu pai!

Listen here the song.