Bolsonaro – “the chainsaw President” – is destroying the Amazon

The President of Brazil's Workers Party (PT), Gleisi Hoffman, has denounced Jair Bolsonaro’s destruction of the Amazon rainforest in a recent speech made in August 2019 which can be read in full below. Under Bolsonaro’s Presidency deforestation has been actively encouraged with disastrous results for Brazil and the entire world. The Brazilian people are resisting Bolsonaro’s environmentally destructive policies. As fires rage through the Amazon rainforest President Bolsonaro personal disapproval rating has reached an all-time high

Brazil: How US intervention paved the way for Bolsonaro’s rise

Daniel Hunt, a founding editor of Brasil Wire addressed the launch meeting of the Brazil Solidarity Initiative. He powerfully summarised how the US has intervened to politically persecute the left and decapitate its leadership through the two coups against Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva. This US intervention has paved the way for a fascist to become the President of the world’s fifth most populous country. Building an immense movement of solidarity with the progressive people of Brazil is absolutely vital. Below is the full transcript of Daniel’s speech.

Repression in Bolsonaro’s Brazil: Rio’s new governor plans to ramp up police brutality

In Brazil, the military and civil police forces are controlled by the state governors. In an interview on GloboNews TV, Governor-elect Witzel said that he wants snipers to perform police operations in favelas to “kill criminals who are carrying restricted weapons.” He has already requested the Rio de Janeiro Civil and Military Police to provide the names of the elite snipers which they have available. According to him, the Rio police, already among the world’s most violent, will have a carte blanche to kill – or to kill even more than they already do in the favelas.

Brazil: US imperialism and the rise of Bolsonaro

At the moment that I write this article (October 2018), Brazil is about to elect Jair Bolsonaro as President of the Republic. He is an ex-military officer and politician who is openly fascist, homophobic, misogynist and racist. Intellectually very limited and with a political career that is absolutely mediocre, Bolsonaro has already publicly declared that “Democracy is good for nothing,” and that the only way to solve Brazil’s problems, is through a new dictatorship that would kill at least 30,000 people. His idol is the great torturer of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Colonel Brilhante Ustra, who used to insert rats in prisoners’ vaginas.