Natimorto

Categoria: Politics

  • Love as an imposed fate

    And other philosophical abstractions

    All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour  
(Paris Paloma, Labour)

    The history of the philosophy of love can be read as a long narrative about human desire; but also, silently, as the history of inequality. In almost every era, love appears as a universal experience, although it is experienced in profoundly different ways. For men, it appears as one dimension among others: an occupation of existence. For women, it often becomes the very meaning of life. This difference does not arise from the feeling itself, but from the way culture has distributed freedom, time, and identity between the sexes.

    In ancient times, love was already thought of from a male perspective. In Plato, eros leads the soul beyond the body, in an ascent towards beauty. The one who loves moves, seeks, overcomes. Love is a path, not a destination; an impulse that accompanies a life dedicated to philosophy, politics, action. Even when love takes centre stage, it does not devour the subject who loves. The lover remains focused on the world. When women appear, they occupy above all the place of symbolic objects: something that inspires, rarely something that thinks. From early on, therefore, love is structured as an active experience on the one hand and a contemplated presence on the other.

    Centuries later, Christianity transforms love into devotion, but maintains the asymmetry. The feminine ideal becomes linked to care, purity, dedication. While men are divided between God, war, work, and thought, women are drawn to the intimate sphere, to bonds, to fidelity. Love becomes their central virtue. The distribution is already beginning to take shape: he loves, but he also builds; she loves and, through this, she exists. The distance between loving and being loved already heralds an asymmetry that would continue for centuries.

    Modernity shifts love to the inner self. With the birth of Romanticism, this difference reaches its most delicate point. Love ceases to be merely a moral or spiritual issue and becomes a promise of completeness. Passion becomes the great drama of modern subjectivity. However, it is not distributed equally: for men, love appears as an intense episode among other projects: career, work, adventure, social recognition. For women, the same love is presented as the final destination, as the place where their identity finds fulfilment. Marriage, home and intimacy become the territory where she must accomplish what he can temporarily abandon. The home becomes the setting where love must prove its truth, and this setting has a gender.

    This is where the thesis becomes visible: men are educated to have a life in which love fits; women, to have a life that fits within love.

    Nietzsche, in criticising the romantic ideal, reveals something essential. For him, absolute passions can threaten the autonomy of the individual. The creative subject needs to keep his distance, to preserve his own strength. Although he does not formulate a feminist critique, his distrust of totalising love shows that the risk of fusion is to lose one’s own self. What Nietzsche describes as an existential danger becomes, for many women, a socially expected condition: to love until one disappears. Love, then, loses its innocence. It is no longer redemption; it is tension. Your critique opens up space to see that love is not necessarily liberating — it can also be a field of power.

    Simone de Beauvoir accurately names this historical difference. In The Second Sex, she shows that men were constituted as subjects: those who act, work, create, move towards the world; while women were taught to seek recognition in the gaze of others. When love presents itself, therefore, it occupies different places. For him, love is one occupation among many. He can love deeply and still preserve a defined identity outside the relationship. For her, love often becomes an absolute project: the relationship ceases to be part of life and becomes the axis that organises all other parts.

    Beauvoir describes this movement with almost painful clarity. A woman in love tends to transform the man into meaning, into a measure of value, into a justification for her own existence. She invests totality where he invests partiality. He loves without abandoning his world; she abandons her world to love. The imbalance is not in the intensity of the feeling, but in the structure that defines what each can lose.

    Love, thus, ceases to be merely a sentimental theme and becomes a political problem. Beauvoir does not claim that women love more; she claims that they have been taught to exist through love. The loving union, so celebrated by romantic tradition, proves to be a trap when it requires one of the two to disappear in order for the couple to exist. To love, in these terms, is to lose oneself.

    Psychoanalysis helps to understand the depth of this phenomenon. To love is to seek recognition, to desire to be chosen. But when an entire subjectivity is built around this choice, love becomes a permanent risk of annulment. The woman not only loves the other: she loves the possibility of existing through him. The man, on the contrary, usually loves from a place that is already socially secure; he does not need to put everything at stake to be recognised.

    Freud and, later, Lacan describe love as an attempt to fill a structural void. The beloved is invested with idealizations that no human being can sustain. To love is also to project, to desire recognition, to negotiate one’s own incompleteness. Love is no longer destiny or virtue: it is the movement of desire, always unstable.

    Contemporary feminist philosophy insists that this difference is not natural. It is taught, repeated, transmitted as if it were inevitable. Boys learn that love is one dimension of life; girls learn that it is the very story of life. One moves on even when he loves; the other is encouraged to stay, wait, sustain. Thus, love becomes an occupation for him and a vocation for her.

    Bell hooks asks why love has been associated with female sacrifice and proposes thinking of it as an ethical practice, not as submission. Judith Butler shows that romantic roles are performative — repeated until they seem natural. Love ceases to be an essence and becomes a learned social language. If it was possible to teach women to live for love, perhaps it is possible to learn to love in another way.

    Perhaps the most delicate point of this thesis is to admit that the problem is not love itself, but the inequality of freedom surrounding it. When a person has multiple projects, love can be experienced as a choice. When one’s entire identity is channelled into the bond, love becomes an ontological necessity. What is an experience for one is a foundation for the other.

    The historical line of philosophy reveals, then, a kind of paradox: the more love was culturally idealised, the more it was associated with the feminine. And the more men were linked to action and creation, the more love became just one of their possible occupations. He can love without disappearing; she was taught to prove her love precisely through disappearance.

    Today, when revisiting this trajectory, we realise that the central question is not whether men and women love differently, but why they were allowed to love in such unequal ways.

    Perhaps the true philosophical transformation occurs when love ceases to be the meaning of life for only one side and becomes an encounter between two existences that already have meaning before they meet.

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  • The Quiet Relevance of Communism in an Unquiet Century

    A Literary–Philosophical Reflection

    There are moments in history when old ideas glow with a strangely renewed light. Not because the world has returned to them, but because the world has exhausted the alternatives. Communism — long treated as a relic, a tattered banner left on the battlefield of the twentieth century — has become, for many, precisely such an idea: abandoned, misunderstood, yet curiously luminous again. Its philosophical pulse can still be felt beneath the noise of our century, as if the spirit of an unrealised future continued to haunt the present.

    Karl Marx wrote that capitalism transforms the world into a icy water of egotistical calculation, a phrase that gains a certain bitter clarity today. One need only walk through a modern metropolis — past the glass towers, the digital billboards that flicker like secular stained-glass, the silent camps of the homeless tucked beneath viaducts — to sense that something essential in the social fabric has thinned. Our era is one of unprecedented wealth and unprecedented loneliness; of technological marvels and spiritual destitution. And it is here that communist ideas, refracted through contemporary thinkers such as Nancy Fraser, David Harvey, Slavoj Žižek, and Thomas Piketty, acquire a resonance that is less ideological than existential.

    I. The Fragile Commons of Human Life

    Émile Durkheim once warned that societies cannot subsist on individualism alone; they collapse into anomie, a kind of moral wandering without compass or horizon. Today, the symptoms of such a condition are everywhere—alienation disguised as productivity, competition dressed up as virtue, and an epidemic of loneliness so profound that the World Health Organization now labels it a public health crisis.

    Communism begins where much of our present despair begins: with the question of community, of the human need for bonds that no market contract can satisfy. It does not merely argue for redistribution; it argues that the human essence is fulfilled not in rivalry but in reciprocity. It imagines a society where solidarity is not an emergency measure reserved for crises, but the default mode of collective existence.

    Communism, by contrast with neoliberalism, begins from the assumption that cooperative social relations — not competitive ones — are fundamental to human flourishing. Contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey notes that capitalist accumulation corrodes community bonds by transforming every relation into an exchange relation, thereby generating systemic precarity and social fragmentation. In this regard, communist principles provide a theoretical counterweight: the social good is not a by-product of markets but the foundation of an organised society.

    II. Inequality as a Slow Violence

    The economist Piketty, with the austere patience of a scientist sorting fossils, has traced how wealth accumulates in ever tighter circles. His data reveal a pattern so consistent that it borders on the mythical: wealth begets wealth; poverty reproduces poverty. The gap widens, and the world tilts.

    But literature reminds us of what statistics cannot say directly: that inequality is a quiet violence. It strips dignity, narrows horizons, and gnaws at the social psyche. Wilkinson and Picketty have shown that societies with great economic divides suffer higher rates of mental illness, homicide, and mistrust. The poor die earlier; the rich die surrounded by walls.

    Communism’s critique, in this light, becomes less a dogma than an ethical reminder: that a society organised around massive inequality is, by definition, a society at war with itself. While full-scale state ownership is not the model contemporary scholars typically advocate, the communist critique of private capital concentration remains analytically indispensable.

    III. Crime as the Shadow of Abandonment

    The sociologist Loïc Wacquant writes of urban marginality as if it were a sprawling architecture of abandonment — zones where hope thins to a whisper. Crime, in this framework, is not a moral failure but a social echo. It arises where the social contract has been hollowed out, where the promises of citizenship have turned to dust.

    Communist principles, with their insistence on eliminating structural deprivation, read like an attempt to silence that echo. A society that guarantees housing, education, healthcare, and dignified work does not need to police its citizens into obedience; it nurtures them into belonging.

    There is something deeply poetic — if also painfully obvious — in the idea that safety is born not from surveillance, but from justice.

    Empirical grounding supports this view: the Nordic countries — while not communist — have long adopted strong redistributive and social welfare mechanisms, and they consistently record some of the lowest crime rates in the world. Their outcomes lend weight to the broader principle: material egalitarianism produces safer societies.

    IV. Education and the Human Condition

    Amartya Sen’s philosophy of “capabilities” teaches that freedom is not merely the absence of constraint but the presence of conditions that allow one to blossom. Education and health are not commodities but the infrastructure of human dignity.

    In this sense, communism, or at least its philosophical heart, speaks to a truth older than any ideology: that a society reveals its ethics through the way it treats the vulnerable. Access to health (as you can see in systems like SUS in Brazil or the NHS in the UK), free universities, public libraries — these institutions, though often battered, embody a simple, subversive idea: knowledge and life should not be rationed by wealth.

    Empirical findings show that:

    • Universal, fully publicly funded healthcare systems reduce overall healthcare costs while improving outcomes.
    • Nations with free higher education exhibit higher levels of social mobility and innovation, contradicting claims that collectivised services suppress individual ambition.
    • Public investment in early childhood education yields some of the highest returns in economics, according to James Heckman’s long-term studies.

    Communism’s insistence that education and health should exist outside the logic of profit appears not only morally compelling but empirically effective.

    V. The Question of the Future

    It is fashionable to say that communism has been tried and has failed. But this critique presupposes that capitalism has succeeded. Climate catastrophe, mass precarity, political cynicism, and the commodification of every crevice of human experience suggest otherwise.

    Nancy Fraser argues that capitalism survives only by devouring the very things it depends upon: nature, care work, and human solidarity. The system is eating its own foundation. In contrast, communist thought — especially in its contemporary, non-authoritarian reinterpretations — asks us to imagine economies governed by the logic of sufficiency rather than accumulation, of cooperation rather than extraction. Yet even within mainstream economic research, the efficiency of public planning is increasingly recognised, especially in sectors where market incentives fail — public health, renewable energy, housing, and infrastructure.

    Examples include:

    1. The success of worker cooperatives, such as the Mondragón Corporation in Spain, which operate according to principles aligned with democratic socialism and have demonstrated durable financial stability for decades.

    2. Long-term industrial planning in China, responsible for the world’s largest poverty reduction in history — a point acknowledged even by economists not sympathetic to communism, such as Joseph Stiglitz.

    The philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote of the “Not-Yet,” the shimmering horizon of unrealised possibilities that draws humanity forward. Communism, in this literary-philosophical sense, belongs to the Not-Yet. It is less a blueprint than a direction; less a programme than a longing for a world in which human life is not structured by the accident of birth or the brutality of markets.

    Conclusion: The Idea That Refuses to Die

    Perhaps communism endures not because it is perfect, but because it articulates something elemental about the human condition: our refusal to accept that suffering is natural; our stubborn hope that society can be arranged more rationally, more tenderly, more justly.

    Its core principles — collective well-being, equitable distribution, universal access to life-sustaining services, and an economy oriented toward human needs rather than profit extraction — speak directly to the most pressing global challenges: inequality, social fragmentation, crime, climate instability, and the erosion of democratic participation.

    In a world where wealth has become increasingly concentrated, public goods increasingly commodified, and social cohesion increasingly fragile, the arguments offered by Marx, supplemented by the work of Fraser, Harvey, Piketty, Sen, Wacquant, and other thinkers, reveal that communist ideas are not relics of a bygone era but tools for imagining a more humane and sustainable future.

    In an age in which inequality widens, the climate warms, and social bonds fray, communist ideas return like an old melody — half-forgotten, yet strangely familiar. They remind us that another world is possible, not because history guarantees it, but because imagination demands it.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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