Andre Pagliarini writes:

Contrary to the ravings of its most fervent reactionaries, Brazil counts its votes accurately and with remarkable efficiency. So when polls closed at 5 p.m. local time on Sunday, the mood on the left soured quickly. Presidential candidate and Rio de Janeiro Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father watched election coverage under house arrest because he attempted a coup four years ago, never trailed as the results trickled in. His allies running for governor and legislative posts—including his stepmother, two brothers, and an uncle who had lost seven elections for various offices in a row before winning a seat in Congress—exceeded expectations almost everywhere, ensuring that a deeply conservative legislature will lurch even further to the right, regardless of who wins the presidency. The Northeast, where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was born over eighty years ago, has more than once been the country’s bulwark against the right. The region’s overwhelming predilection for its native son kept Flávio from running away with an outright victory. With roughly 47 percent of the national vote for Flávio and 45 percent for Lula, the two will face off in a second round in three weeks.

He may be faltering, but the fact that Lula remains in contention is a testament to the durability of his political coalition. In 1979, then in his early thirties, he proclaimed that “we are living in the greatest moment the Brazilian working class has ever known.” He was referring to the salutary effects of working-class mobilization that he, as president of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema, had both witnessed and helped orchestrate. That experience propelled him onto the national stage. Lula won the presidency in 2002 as part of a wave of progressive, anti-neoliberal governments born of social movements that remade Latin America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Despite its shortcomings, that Pink Tide left a positive mark on the region: Poverty and inequality fell sharply, while millions gained access to social programs and educational opportunities. Governments across the region recognized the political claims of groups long kept at the margins.

The dominant political current running through the hemisphere today is darker. It mirrors its predecessor in ambition but inverts its purpose. Where the left of the 2000s promised recognition and redistribution, the far right now sweeping the Americas—from Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei to José Antonio Kast and Abelardo de la Espriella—runs on ideological retribution and violent judgment. In particular, Flávio Bolsonaro has embraced Bukele’s model for Brazil, promising new maximum-security prisons modeled on El Salvador’s, tougher sentences, and a more heavily armed and surveilled state. This is less a program to address the causes of urban violence than a promise to crush his enemies. Indeed, to say that he has no solution to organized crime is too generous because it presumes that he views it as a problem. His well-documented links to paramilitary syndicates in Rio de Janeiro inspire little confidence that he is interested in tackling the cyclical drivers of urban insecurity. The likelier result is renewed incitement of the police brutality that made his father a hero to the Brazilian right. Continental Bukelism is the permanent revolution of the blood-red tide soaking the region. [Continue reading…]