Known in Portuguese as the “Bancada do Boi, da Bala, e da Bíblia”, Brazil’s right-wing “beef, bullets, and Bible” caucus earned its pejorative acronym for its political ties with rural property-owners, arms and ammunition lobbyists, and Evangelical politicians. The “BBB” Caucus combines interests pertaining to deforestation and agribusiness, gun control and law enforcement, as well as abortion and women’s rights. This economically and socially conservative assembly demonstrated that it is a force to be reckoned with after the October 7 general elections to elect the nation’s next President, Vice President, and National Congress.
As is well known by now, presidential candidate and vocal BBB backer Jair Bolsonaro won the first round of the general election with 46 percent of the vote, defeating the Worker’s Party candidate and former São Paulo Mayor, Fernando Haddad. The two will compete in a run-off on Sunday, October 28, in which Bolsonaro is heavily favored.
Like most conservative politicians in Latin America, Bolsonaro is proudly anti-communist, often citing the sadly relevant example of Venezuela to lament the consequences of extreme left-wing politics. Bolsonaro’s party, the Social Liberal Party, champions economically liberal policies that support privatization and decentralization. The party platform has also grown to adopt more socially conservative policies on issues like abortion and the legalization of marijuana, as well as newer concerns regarding the teaching of sexual and gender identity in schools.
For Brazilians whose interests fall under the “balas” or bullets category of the BBB Caucus, Bolsonaro’s law-and-order stance against drugs and delinquency holds great appeal. (Brazil, after all, is a country notorious for its street violence.) The “Bíblia” or Bible constituency, comprised of millions of Evangelical Christians, is equally attracted to the Roman Catholic candidate for his defense of traditional family values. Likewise, rural lobbyists and land-owners who make up the “boi,” or beef, part of the BBB are attracted to Bolsonaro for his economic views critical of globalization and free trade.
A victory by Bolsonaro, a former army captain who aims to liberalize gun laws and take stricter measures against criminality and drug trafficking, would end a 16-year political winning streak of left-wing candidates for Brazil’s presidency. This victory would come, not unrelatedly, as a firm reaction to the corruption accusations against progressive politicians that have rocked Brazil’s politics for the past four years. These accusations and the ongoing “Operation Car Wash” corruption probe have produced some of the largest protests in modern Brazilian political history.
Bolsonaro’s current advantage has many political analysts in a state of bewilderment. An anti-establishment populist, using pro-military rhetoric that glorifies Brazil’s bygone authoritarian military dictatorship, is in line for the presidency of a country that adopted democracy only 33 years ago. It’s not a secret, moreover, that Bolsonaro has made derogatory comments against homosexuals and women, which makes his popularity all the more dazzling.
Dazzling, that is, if we don’t consider that voters have more important considerations than a candidate’s language. Brazilians’ main concern for this election, and rightly so, is their country’s problem with corruption. The failures of Brazil’s progressive governments, and the hypocritical actions of its self-dealing politicians, are fresher in voters’ minds than the years of military dictatorship. Bolsonaro, controversial and bold as he may be, has not been implicated in any cases of federal corruption like the ones that haunt Worker’s Party politicians. For many voters, that fact alone is an improvement and compelling enough reason to vote for him.
Brazil’s disillusionment with progressive rule has been a long time in coming. Since the Worker’s Party President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva rose to power in 2003, Brazil has been ruled by a series of leftist governments that have produced in turn a series of scandals. The year 2014 was particularly tumultuous, as Dilma Rousseff, also a member of the Worker’s Party, was re-elected President after taking over from “Lula” when he was accused of corruption. To make matters worse, in 2015, Rousseff faced proceedings of her own on similar charges of corruption. Rousseff was temporarily suspended in 2016 until the Senate voted 61-20 in favor of her impeachment upon finding her guilty of breaking budgetary laws.
The Vice President of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, Michel Temer, took over Rousseff’s duties and implemented some policies that broke with her Worker’s Party platform. Although more pragmatic and amenable to compromise with conservative politicians, Temer has nonetheless proven a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He was eventually charged with racketeering and obstruction of justice, resulting in an abysmal approval rating despite his generally more moderate views. The disillusionment with Temer shows that voters do not just want a right-leaning candidate who pays lip-service to tackling corruption. This fact is provocatively borne out by one of Bolsonaro’s campaign videos, which brushes aside the fact that the candidate has been compared to Mussolini and Hitler to conclude, “they call him everything but CORRUPT.”
Indeed, the divisive presidential candidate for the world’s fourth-largest democracy has been roundly criticized; he has been repeatedly protested; and, as is now standard for any right-wing populist, he has been likened to Donald Trump. In one incident, Bolsonaro was rushed to a hospital after a left-wing protester stabbed him on the streets during a rally. Bolsonaro’s popularity among undecided and politically independent voters increased after the stabbing, likely because the event validated Bolsonaro’s criticism of street violence and corroborated his call for gun ownership in one of the world’s most violent countries. A women’s march against Bolsonaro also took place at the end of September, after which it was reported that support for Bolsonaro among women increased. These reactions against Bolsonaro’s conservative views have actually helped his popularity; such is the backlash that senseless uprisings tend to have among independent or undecided voters.
An article in Foreign Policy recently observed that the reason for the “Trumpfication of the Latin American Right” is primarily social, because the “rampant” problem of inequality throughout Latin America “makes electoral politics in the region structurally difficult for right-wing parties.” As a result, Presidents like Argentina’s Mauricio Macri and Michel Temer himself “have been slow to dismantle popular anti-poverty programs.” The reality of mass Latin American poverty complicates the practical implementation of the free-market economic principles for which many right-leaning Latin American politicians advocate, leading them to embrace half-measures. If elected, that may well prove true of Bolsonaro, who has already shown signs of bucking free-market orthodoxy.
Be that as it may, it is misleading to frame events in Brazil as resulting from the “Trumpification” of the country’s politics. This political race should not be reduced to a mere consequence of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is all too common, and frankly egotistical of U.S. commentary, to assume that the “emergence” of right-wing political figures throughout Europe and Latin America is due to the political influence of the U.S. Executive Branch. It would behoove Western progressives to consider in political, intellectual, and cultural humility that their desire to see socially and economically liberal policies in traditionally conservative countries is being met with opposition.
Champions of liberal democracy have long pinned high hopes on Brazil from afar. In 2016, Brookings senior fellow Ted Piccone published a book called Five Rising Democracies, which argued that India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia were at opportune moments in their political histories to serve as exemplars of liberal ideas and practices. They were in this unique position, he argued, because of their recent shift from authoritarian governance to democracy. Piccone wrote that an “embrace of globalization and liberal norms” has “directly, and positively, affected [the countries’] own trajectories both economically and politically.” The book came out in February, months before the mass protests against the corruption accusations and eventual impeachment of Rousseff.
A similar premise can be seen in a Financial Times column by Gideon Rachman discussing the years 1995-2003, when Fernando Henrique Cardoso served as President of Brazil and implemented liberal economic reforms. Those reforms, writes Rachman, took place “in an era when liberal economic and political ideas were in the ascendancy around the world” in other developing countries; in the subsequent Lula era, progress continued and Brazil implemented several social programs to combat its notorious inequality, attracting global praise. Yet in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and the country’s corruption scandals, Rachman writes, things grew dark again. The conclusion of the article astutely notes that in good times, Brazil’s policies were a symbol of the “triumph of liberal politics and economics around the world,” while “in the bad times . . . Brazil’s plight has become a symptom of a global crisis in the liberal order.”
What both these analyses share is the common error of judging Brazil according to outside expectations of “progress,” rather than the actual concerns of its citizens. Many of them are plainly unsatisfied with the leftist agendas that have accompanied Brazil’s economic modernization. Brazilian Evangelicals, for instance, are one large subgroup of people who are voting for Bolsonaro because of a sentiment that the Left “went too far” by pressing social issues regarding sexuality, gender, and race. Bolsonaro also tends to dismiss the work of human rights organizations. This Tuesday, for instance, he stated that he will attempt to stop funding human rights organizations if he were elected President, and also pull out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which he called a “meeting of communists.”
The social concerns now motivating most Brazilian voters are inseparable from Brazil’s particular history of economic development. Milton Santos, a Brazilian geographer and scholar in the urbanization of developing countries with vaguely Marxist sympathies, predicted this turn of events several decades ago. Santos noted that a rapidly changing society in an underdeveloped country, kindled by economic pressure to grow, would eventually face social upheaval. Writing at the end of the 20th century, Santos saw Brazil’s period of modernization as attempting all too frantically to adopt progressive economic, political, and social norms that had worked for countries whose history of development had run a different course. He became a critic of globalization and late in life wrote a book advocating “an other globalization” that does not derive “from the dominant perspective of the West.”
Santos argued that modernization created rigid class divisions in Latin American countries, the result of economic policies that worked in one country being generalized and applied in a quite different context. Although he was primarily an analyst of urban development in Latin American nations, he also astutely realized the social and political consequences that would arise from imposed modernization.
Today Santos would recognize a similar error in American analysts’ attempts to describe Brazil’s political situation in terms of their own. It is all too easy—and simplistic—to believe that Bolsonaro’s popularity stems from the same rotten roots of bigotry, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia that allegedly produced Trump. Such accusations are particularly perplexing in a country where the majority of people consider themselves to be of mixed-race descent.
Santos was part of an intellectual tradition of Brazilian thinkers who were keenly aware of the social reality of inequality and poverty in their nation. He recognized the close association that exists between economics and culture, and between culture and politics. He wrote, “Whenever the complex of economic, social, political, cultural and moral subsystems causes old variables to re-emerge or creates new ones, the influence of the world system over its dependent space takes on different forms.”1 His technical language notwithstanding, Santos’s judgment is a valuable one. “Subsystems” are his terminology for the ways of life of underdeveloped nations, as compared with the influential way of life of “world systems.” The historical maturation of “the complex” of the different facets of life that he mentions in any particular nation will cause “old variables”, or old values, to re-emerge and change, as things naturally tend to do. The problem, then, is not with change, but rather with the belief that the influence of a predominant world system will be identically manifested in another place. Quite the contrary, it will “take on different forms.”
Brazil today is demonstrating just such a reaction to foreign pressure to adopt progressive, liberal values. Some of the intervention comes from private organizations like the Ford Foundation, whose work in Brazil aims to promote social justice, focusing on “women’s rights, antidiscrimination efforts . . . reproductive health and the new social environment challenges.” The Ford Foundation claims that the roots of Brazil’s inequality lie in discrimination, but well-meaning efforts to change Brazilian society can create new problems, just as Santos predicted.
To take one example, efforts to address racial inequality modeled on our own sociopolitical contexts have created new social problems surrounding race identity in Brazil, and a controversial new means to categorize racial make-up. A recent article in Foreign Policy about Brazil’s “New Problem with Blackness” captures the controversy over affirmative action laws in Brazil.
The laws, implemented in 2001, are similar in theory to those implemented in the United States, creating de facto race-based quota systems for placement in federal universities or government jobs. Brazil’s distinct history of race-relations however, which encouraged miscegenation, resulted in a “racial democracy” that is decidedly mixed-race. Thus, the seemingly simple question of asking a student whether he or she identifies as black has not translated well to the Brazilian context. The article rightly suggests that issues plaguing one country are not experienced in the same way elsewhere, and that policies working in one context may not be effectively translated to another: “What’s already clear is that affirmative action, as a strategy for racial equality, has proven an uneasy fit for Brazil, resolving certain racial dilemmas by creating entirely new ones.” Brazilians have clearly felt this change. One article on Bolsonaro’s popularity reported that some voters feel that the Left in Brazil has only created division “between whites and blacks, gays and heterosexuals.”
In short, what we are witnessing now in Latin America’s largest country is the fulfillment of Santos’s predictions. At the heart of the matter is a collective reaction against social shifts that have been attempting to displace and replace traditional family values that Latin Americans hold dear with a progressive disposition, imposing secularism, globalism, and individualism on a people who are largely opposed to such a way of life. A country predominantly comprised of Christians is not ready to accede to liberal social policies on abortion, sex education, or economic policies that flirt with socialism, much less communism. The present turmoil in Brazil is the result of a frantic and rushed modernization, entangled with the complicated, historical consequences of an economic and social development that failed to resolve the country’s poverty and inequality, all yielding to popular backlash.
So can it be a mere reflection of U.S. politics that Latin American nations are demonstrating a return to traditional conservative values? Not if it is considered that Latin America has always been generally conservative, and that it has the salutary reference of proximate countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia to constantly remind it of the problems that corrupt, pseudo-Marxist rule can bring. All three countries, it should be added, have also precipitated immigration crises in their economically strong neighbors, whose Presidents tend to be more conservative. The economic collapse of Venezuela, for example, replete with food shortages, rising inflation, and social instability, has spurred a wave of emigration over the past two years that has damaged the Left’s case for socialism anywhere in Latin America.
Many of those who fled Venezuela crossed over to one of its neighboring countries, Colombia. And just in May, Colombia’s presidential elections witnessed the victory of Iván Duque Marquez, a self-proclaimed centrist, devout Catholic, and member of the right-wing party Centro Democrático, founded by the conservative politician and former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. Venezuela’s problems, spilling over into its neighbor, may well turn Colombia away from left-wing populism, joining other nations like Argentina and Chile. Bolsonaro, too, is close to joining the ranks of other right-leaning Latin-American Presidents, like Argentina’s Mauricio Macri and Chile’s Sebastián Piñera, who have openly criticized mass immigration for their nations, advocated free-market principles, and firmly resisted socially liberal agendas relating to abortion and sex education in schools.
The issues that resonate most with supporters of candidates like Bolsonaro are those that have their origins in religious and family values. It is in the social realm, after all, that cultural shifts are most palpable. The recent voting outcome of Brazil’s general election and in Colombia this past spring are the political manifestations of a social disposition to resist changing values. To put it curtly, this phenomenon of right-wing candidates rising to power is not new. It is a case of old values resurfacing, and warily taking on a new form after years of dissatisfaction with progressive politics.
Should Bolsonaro be elected on Sunday, it will open a new chapter for Latin America, as most of the continent’s economic powers will be run by conservative Presidents. But even if Bolsonaro does not win the election, it is important to remember that social conservatism in South America is alive and well, and it will command many voters’ political loyalties for years to come. If our goal is to understand Latin American culture and to elucidate the continent’s politics, ignoring these social concerns, or dismissing those who espouse such stances as ignorant, would do them—and us—a great disservice.
1 Milton Santos, The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries (Routledge, 1979), p. 15.