Introduction: Brazil under Bolsonaro

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's triumph in the October 30, 2022, election for an unprecedented third term as president of Brazil has been considered an emblematic victory for democracy and progressive change by academic observers and the international press. Even though da Silva won by a narrow margin (1.8 percent of the vote), it was an important defeat for the antidemocratic extremist Jair Messias Bolsonaro, an “insignificant, low-level” (baixo clero) politician who represented the far-right in Brazilian politics for more than two decades before being elected the thirty-eighth Brazilian president in 2018. That year, Bolsonaro’s election win also captured international attention but for different reasons. Newspapers and magazines worldwide, from a broad range of ideological perspectives, reacted to Bolsonaro’s election mostly with apprehension. The British magazine The Economist wrote immediately prior to the elections that “the probable president [Bolsonaro] is reviving Latin America’s unholy marriage between market economics and political authoritarianism.” ¹ The headline of the New York Times article on the presidential inauguration read: “Jair Bolsonaro Sworn in as Brazil’s President, Cementing Rightward Shift.” ² Observers across the globe immediately appeared deeply concerned about Brazilian democracy and the effects Bolsonaro’s election would have on the country’s domestic and foreign policies.

Inside Brazil it was no different. Journalists, politicians, artists, and academics expressed concerns about the effects of Bolsonaro’s election on economics, politics, social and human rights, the environment, indigenous people, Afro-Brazilians, the LGBTI+ community, and the poor and working classes. Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had been reluctant to openly criticize the candidate prior to the 2018 elections, has since declared that Bolsonaro could jeopardize Brazil’s image abroad. Rubens Ricupero, one of Brazil’s most experienced diplomats, said that the proposals of Jair Bolsonaro “could leave Brazil poorer, isolated, and despised.” ³

At the time of Bolsonaro’s election, the far-right was on the rise worldwide. Political leaders around the globe have been elected as part of this trend. Erdoğan in 2014 in Turkey, Trump in 2016 in the United States, Duterte in 2016 in the Philippines, and Bolsonaro in 2018 in Brazil are prominent examples. Nationalism, antiglobalism, and populism are some of the terms that academics, the media, and ordinary people use to explain the phenomenon. Are we observing a new wave of fascism? Why are human rights, socially marginalized groups, and social and political activists under attack? Is democracy in danger?

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018: 4) argue that the current political situation contributes to the ways in which democracies may collapse. Different from military coups d’état, nowadays “democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.” Nevertheless, in the Brazilian case, the participation of the military in Brazilian politics dates to the founding of the republic in 1889 if not earlier, and this fact should be taken into account. The election of Bolsonaro calls for debate on the role of the military in national politics and its impacts on the quality of Brazilian democracy. Discussing the process of redemocratization in Brazil after military rule, the political scientist Alfred Stepan (1986: 108) considered that “for any contemporary democratic polis to increase its effective control of the military and intelligence system requires an effort by civil society to strengthen itself by improving its capacity for control.” This debate becomes urgent in light of the persistence of military power in Brazilian politics. In a study from the 1970s, the Brazilian sociologist Edmundo Coelho (2000: 19) warned that the pursuit of identity of the Brazilian military had led to a double orphanhood of part of this social segment—a functional one reflecting the military's belief that society and its political elite had no regard for it and an institutional one reflecting its conviction that no one was listening to it or interested in the issues that concerned it. In Coelho’s view, this pursuit of political protagonism was bound to lead to a desire to define as autonomous the objectives and strategies regarding national defense (or security) doctrine that it might eventually impose on the nation (20).

Observing the motto of the Bolsonaro government, “Brazil above everything, God above everyone,” one recalls the argument of the Brazilian historian Alcir Lenharo (1986) that the business discourse of the 1940s sought to promote the physical and moral well-being of the working class as a way of strengthening the ties between employers and employees. To do so, the authoritarian Estado Novo (1937–1945) of Getúlio Vargas used precepts of the Catholic Church as the principal foundations for ordering Brazilian society, invoking the symbolism of the cross as the primordial representation of order. “Anyone who has obeyed an order retains resistance, like the prick of a thorn, inside him as a crystallized form of resentment and will be able to get rid of it only when a similar order is issued” (Lenharo, 1986: 189). Here the figure of the soldier appears as a “satisfied prisoner,” who, as he rises in his career, will create new orders to goad his inferiors. Thus, totalitarianism is naturalized through the state, with fascism being a faith, a moral order. By defending the “New Man,” the Brazilian manifestation of fascism in the form of Integralism, ⁴ conservative forces appropriated the religious discourse of God, Fatherland, and Catholic values. This process, layering religious values over politics, that Lenharo detailed in describing the authoritarian regime of Vargas in the late 1930s and the early 1940s can be helpful for us in understanding the Bolsonaro government.

Although Bolsonaro was elected in part because of a wave of anticorruption and anti–Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) sentiment, the concerns about Brazil’s young democracy and its image worldwide should not be neglected. After more than three decades of the reconstruction of democratic institutions in Brazil, a former captain with a history of antidemocratic, homophobic, misogynist, and racist declarations and attitudes was elected president of the largest and richest country in South America. Two of Bolsonaro’s declarations while a congressman (from a 1999 television interview) sum up his politics: "Elections won’t change anything in this country. Things will only change on the day that we break out into civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn’t do: kill 30,000. If some innocent people die, that’s fine. In every war, innocent people die.” More recently, his declaration of support for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 extolled the military regime that came to power in 1964 and praised Col. Carlos Brilhante Ustra, who oversaw the torture of Rousseff in 1970 while she was a political prisoner.

In How Fascism Works, the U.S. philosopher Jason Staley (2018: 188) says that “the mechanisms of fascist politics all build on and support one another. They weave together a myth of a distinction between us and them, based on a romanticized fictional past featuring us and not them, and supported by a resentment of a corrupt elite, who takes our hard-earned money and threatens our tradition.” In From Fascism to Populism in History, the Argentine historian Federico Fichelstein (2017: xii) argues that old and new populism and fascist experiences cannot be reduced to their national or regional conditions. “We now have no excuse to allow geopolitical narcissism to stand against historical interpretation, especially when analyzing ideologies that cross borders and oceans and even influence each other.” In this sense, populism and fascism are not located solely in Europe, the United States, or Latin America but a transnational and global phenomenon.

Moreover, we cannot neglect certain aspects of Brazilian history and its authoritarian roots. In the words of the Brazilian anthropologist and historian Lilia M. Schwartz (2019: 37),

Despite the fact that since 1988, and with the promulgation of the Citizens’ Constitution, we have experienced the longest period of a rule of law and democracy in republican Brazil, we have not managed to reduce our inequality, combat institutional and structural racism against black and indigenous peoples, [and] eradicate practices of gender violence. Our present is indeed full of the past, and history does not serve as a consolation prize. However, it is important to face the present, especially because it is not the first time that we return to the past with questions that are related to the present.

Since achieving its independence from Portugal in 1822, Brazil has been navigating in troubled waters as an autonomous country. From 1822 to the fall of the monarchy in 1889, it struggled to be recognized as an independent actor in the international system, create a centralized state, reinsert itself into the international economic system as an agrarian country, and maintain slavery as its main labor force. These were all political decisions that the Brazilian elite considered necessary to create and maintain a consolidated nation with territorial integrity.

From the proclamation of the republic in 1889 to the so-called Liberal Revolution of 1930 (which was more a conservative pact among sectors of the economic and political elites than a revolution), successive Brazil governments defended the interests of agrarian exporters, sought international prestige, and pragmatically changed the diplomatic axis from Europe to the United States. In the context of World War I, there was a certain acceleration of industrialization, and from 1930 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s government policy used industrialization to pursue economic and social development. This plan was relatively successful, since the country did manage to industrialize, but it failed to distribute wealth and build a more egalitarian society. From the 1990s on Brazilian governments have been adjusting their strategies while still trying to be a fully developed country.

This historical journey has been embedded in a nationalism that might be considered an important variable in explaining Brazilian social and political characteristics and, more recently, an essential component in explaining Bolsonaro’s government. The historian Bradford E. Burns (1967: 202) suggested that “the working and middle classes in the burgeoning metropolis were increasingly exposed to the nationalistic ideas of the intellectuals through the expanding networks of press and radio. Vargas saw the advantages of combining and using the political potential of its increasing working class and the growing popularity of nationalist doctrines.” The dissemination of nationalist ideas found an audience interested in expanding the country’s sovereignty and retaining a certain suspicion of foreigners. In a nutshell, nationalists pragmatically sought economic and social development and greater diplomatic independence, seeking to break free of the bipolar Cold War and its demand for ideological alignments.

Nationalism as an important component of Bolsonaro’s rhetoric joins God and country in a single powerful image. In the arguments of Ernesto Araújo, the first minister of foreign affairs in the Bolsonaro government, nationalism is a means of restoring Brazil to the Western developed world. For him the West has economic and military superiority but suffers from a “mysterious evil,” a loss of faith in values. In this connection, Araújo claims to understand and defend the “real” values   of the West, as expressed in a speech President Donald Trump made in Poland in 2017 in which he argued that the nation was a spiritual stronghold necessary for the defense of the West, which had been experiencing serious challenges due to globalism. In Araújo’s analysis of Trump’s worldview, some of the biggest obstacles in the West are radical Islamic terrorism, bureaucracy, and the loss of identity. According to this reasoning, there are internal and external enemies that aggravate this loss of identity. For Trump, according to Araújo, the West is a community of nations with historical particularities that share cultural ties, tradition, and faith.

Citing Trump, Araújo (2017: 328) concurs with his analysis: “The West is certainly a group, but not a misshapen mass, much less a group of states based on a treaty, but a group of nations—entities defined each in its deep historical and cultural identity and not as legal entities [that are] abstract—conceived from unique experiences and not from cold principles or values.  ” Therefore, any arrangement that seeks to eradicate borders, promote supranationalism, and share values will be at variance with the basic principle of the West. The characteristics of this community, which is made up of nationalities, include works of art that inspire a belief in God; the celebration of heroes, traditions, and customs; the rule of law; freedom of expression; empowerment of women; the centrality of the family; the habit of debating and the desire to know; and the dignity of all lives that coexist in freedom.

The former minister of foreign relations under Bolsonaro has observed that postmodern Europe contributes to removing the past and the history of the Western experiment, a movement that stems from the Enlightenment that created a liberal and revolutionary tradition without a past, without a soul, family, or God. For him, “postmodern man killed God a long time ago and doesn't like to be reminded of his crime.” Thus, according to Araújo, to save the West Trump highlights the heroic figure so as to rediscover the collective unconscious that was abandoned by technocratic liberalism and political correctness. However, for him Western values   should not be diluted in an “amorphous mass” of universal values. Furthermore, because global governance is impossible given the difficulties of multilateralism, the decisions of independent countries should be respected. "For Trump, countries in the international arena are governed by duties, not values'' (334). Pan-nationalism is defended; cosmopolitanism is rejected. Thus, there is no international community, and there are no universal values because a community built on abstract values   is not a community. The homeland is founded on the nation. Araújo, in criticizing the project of modernity/reason, wishes to see a Brazilian nation refounded on the Western principles to which it is linked by history: "Brazil, the supreme fruit of this mystery, has a deep and sacred origin, linked to the depths of the Western soul as manifested in the Portuguese race" (343).

Rationality in Brazilian society is another important element in understanding Bolsonaro’s ideology and appeal. The Brazilian diplomat and philosopher Sérgio Paulo Rouanet (1987: 126) wrote that the country was undergoing a new wave of irrationalism: “On all fronts, reason is on the defensive.” For him this wave had two complementary aspects, one external and the other internal. The first was the influence of the counterculture movement of the 1970s, which was theoretically poststructuralist and saw reason as a mere manifestation of power. Regarding the second he argued (125) that

undoubtedly, Brazilian irrationalism is not an "out of place idea." Perhaps the authoritarian regime's educational policy is the most important of these internal factors. For 20 years, [the military dictatorship] methodically weeded out of the curriculum everything that had to do with general ideas and humanistic values. In this sense, what is at the origin of the “counterculture” is “unculture”—a politically engendered unculture. Young people do not challenge reason in the name of Nietzsche or Bergson, as the European irrationalists of the interwar period did, for the excellent reason that no one has taught them that these authors exist. The graduates of this deficient educational system simply transform their nonknowledge into a norm of life and a model for a new form of organization of human relations.

In short, the practical and theoretical consequences of such positions would be felt through the application of the logic of antireason to antiauthoritarian, anticolonialist. and antielitist tendencies (Rouanet, 1987: 144):

In this irrationalist appropriation of three tendencies so fundamental to the work of reason, we feel the latency of an old theme that has accompanied Western thought as its shadow side, its curse, perhaps its hidden truth: that of reason as the enemy of life. It is the topos of the Counter-Enlightenment, the same that inspired the feudal fantasies of German Romanticism, Nietzsche's will to power, or the Aryan myth of the great Caucasian race. The theme is now being revived in Brazil, without people’s generally realizing its origins, and, as in European conservative thought, it takes the form of a split between the pole of life and that of theory.

This process, which had previously led to fascism, could impose its opposite. Thus antiauthoritarianism could deprive the oppressed of the means to think about their own liberation, anticolonialism could reinforce dependency structures, and antielitism could strengthen the cultural monopoly of the upper class (145). In Rouanet’s opinion, reflection on these consequences was urgent given the importance of the struggle against critical aspects of irrationalism.

Conservative thinking was already circulating and attacking what it called “cultural populism,” which allegedly threatened the privileges of the “upper class.” However, to leave critical thinking unchanged would grant victory to the conservatives and reactionaries. The resumption of reason could put it at the service of social transformation, making antiauthoritarianism a denunciation of a social system of domination based on the ignorance of those dominated. In the same vein, anticolonialism criticizes foreign mass culture, and antielitism rejects the “oligarchic cultural policy that reserves art, literature, and philosophy for the enjoyment of a minority but does not reject art, literature, and philosophy outright” (145–146). In this regard, the conservative and reactionary ideas expressed in the Bolsonaro government's arguments allow us to identify the traces of the debate regarding the condemnation of Enlightenment reason that was under way in the 1980s and indicate that the trenches in the defense of that reason had been abandoned and neglected for a long time.

All that said, after four years of Bolsonaro’s government its characteristics and consequences should be analyzed. The need to understand the reasons for and implications of Bolsonaro’s election and the nature and policies of his government is urgent and necessary. It also helps us understand his electoral defeat in 2022, as well as Lula’s victory, including the fact that the contest was so close. This is the main aim of this issue. The editors have taken to heart the enlightened opinion of Fernand Braudel that researchers of the present may understand the “fine weaving” of structures, rejecting the real as it is perceived. In that spirit, we present a set of articles that reject simplistic perceptions in favor of recognition of the complexity of reality and the “fine weaving” of history. In order to make sense of contemporary Brazil, we have selected 16 articles written during the Bolsonaro years that should clarify the complexity of his rule.

“The Rise of Fascism in Brazil” by Armando Boito analyzes the Bolsonaro government, its most active social base of support, and the political crisis that gave rise to it and criticizes the classical and current bibliography on fascism. Operating with a concept of fascism embedded in the Marxist tradition, it characterizes the government and its social base as neofascist. It also argues for the development of a typology of political crises in capitalist societies, showing that the nature and dynamics of the 2015–2018 Brazilian political crisis are typical of the kind of crisis that gives rise to fascism.

In “The Social Base of Bolsonarism: An Analysis of Authoritarianism in Politics,” Mariana Miggiolaro Chaguri and Oswaldo E. do Amaral show that the cohesion and resilience of the social base supporting Bolsonaro are grounded in an authoritarian perception of politics and society. Their article also demonstrates the existence of transversality in support of the president in terms of social stratification, arguing that Bolsonarism is a social and political phenomenon that responds to a varied set of demands present in contemporary Brazilian society. The authors articulate a statistical analysis of data from a national survey with a sociological approach to the construction of an authoritarian vision of politics and society in Brazil to suggest that the authoritarian right as a political and electoral force will persist in the country and that it has some characteristics that distinguish it from conservative movements in the Global North.

“Bolsonaro, the Last Colonizer,” by Manuel Domingos Neto and Luís Gustavo Guerreiro Moreira, describes the indigenous policy of Bolsonaro’s ultraconservative government, seeking to identify the foundations of its policies, its main actors, and its behavior. Employing the concepts of nationalism, colonialism, and the coloniality of power, the authors argue that the foundation of the relationship between the Brazilian state and native peoples is one of “guardianship” by the state. In their view, the ultraconservatism of this policy is facilitated by the capture of the state by agrarian and extractive capital elites that seek to exploit the Amazon rain forest at any cost, considering the indigenous peoples of the region an obstacle. The military has a prominent position in this offensive, which violates elementary notions of human rights. Given this fact, the legislative and judiciary powers deal ambiguously with national and international laws, statutes, and conventions. The authors also contend that the reelection of the Bolsonaro government will accelerate the extinction of the surviving indigenous ethnic groups.

In “Between Markets and Barracks: The Economic Policy Narrative of Brazilian Authoritarianism,” Niels Søndergaard analyzes the economic policy narrative of Bolsonaro's electoral campaign in 2018 through the theoretical lens of authoritarian neoliberalism. He uses a conceptual perspective that facilitates an understanding of how Bolsonaro's economic policy narrative has worked by essentially relegating economic matters to technocratic management outside the sphere of democratic debate and instrumentalizing antagonisms of social groups and institutions with a redistributive objective.

“Development Projects, Models of Capitalism, and Political Regimes in Brazil, 1988–2021,” by Carlos Eduardo Santos Pinho, considers the context of the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution and the promarket reforms generated by the circuits of financial globalization, investigates the new democratic developmentism as a strategy of economic growth with inclusion, and examines the specificity of the 2016 democratic breakdown and its culmination in the Bolsonaro administration, pointing to a model of unregulated capitalism combined with authoritarianism. It concludes that, in addition to the deepening of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s and the regression of the inclusive policies of the 2000s, there is a causal relationship between the content of neoliberal public policies, the reduction in the level of political participation in their implementation, and the degeneration of democratic institutions.

Joaze Bernardino-Costa, in “Opening Pandora’s Box: The Extreme Right and the Resurgence of Racism in Brazil,” argues that Bolsonarism emerged through the articulation of various groups that mobilized on social networks around key ideas such as a common enemy, moral conservatism, economic liberalism, patriotism, and public security. Based on research on social networks and journalism, his work aims to understand this phenomenon and its relationship with racism and antiracism. He argues that Bolsonarism has opened a Pandora's box, releasing a combination of racist antiracialism and racist racialism that aims to dismantle the recent achievements of the black population, especially the antiracist policies adopted during the PT administrations.

“Radical Reorganization of Environmental Policy: Contemporaneous Evidence from Brazil,” by Mauro Guilherme Maidana Capelari, Ana Karine Pereira, Nathaly M. Rivera, and Suely Mara Vaz Guimarães de Araújo, offers an overview of the reorganization of environmental policy since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019. Employing an analysis of publications on the subject, it argues that the rise to power of a new political elite led to a radical change in Brazil’s trajectory of climate change initiatives and environmental protection. It documents an association between the new political elite in power and the disruption of two factors historically relevant for the design of environmental policy: the participation of civil society in the governance of public policy and multilateralism in environmental policy.

In “The Far-Right Takeover in Brazil: Effects on the Health Agenda,” Maíra S. Fedatto examines the impacts of the new government on public health by analyzing the Mais Médicos (More Doctors) Program, the new drug policy, and the restructuring of the HIV/AIDS Department. Among its conclusions is that the Neo-Pentecostal approach of Bolsonaro’s government has effectively militarized its supporters on the basis of moral values and this orientation will challenge the future of the secular state and its substantial gains and leading role in human rights, environmental protection, and international cooperation for health.

In “The Fight against Hunger in Brazil: From Politicization to Indifference,” Lourrene Maffra discusses how administrations have dealt with the problem of hunger in Brazil from Lula da Silva’s government (2003–2010) until Bolsonaro’s term. After offering an extensive literature review with an analysis of public policies and statistical data from reports of national research agencies and international organizations, she argues that the fight against hunger in Brazil reached the highest priority during the Lula da Silva government, with institutional structuring and an international model of public policy. From then on, a downward curve began in relation to the prioritization of the agenda to combat hunger in the country with subsequent governments, resulting in a complete neglect of the issue under Bolsonaro.

“Protests for Women's Rights and against the Bolsonaro Administration,” by Olivia Cristina Perez, Joana Tereza Vaz de Moura, and Caroline Bandeira de Brito Melo, draws on news items and documents produced mainly by feminist social movements to examine the agendas of three protests: the one known as #EleNao, the one that took place on International Women's Day, and the Marcha das Margaridas. In general, these protests defended women's rights and criticized the Bolsonaro government. The article demonstrates changes in the relationship between social movements and the government, as well as changes in the strategies of social movements that are taking to the streets in defense of democracy and in favor of expanding their rights.

Andre Pagliarini, in “Tongues of Fire: Silas Malafaia and the Historical Roots of Neo-Pentecostal Power in Bolsonaro’s Brazil,” examines a prominent Brazilian Pentecostal pastor as a way of understanding the intersection of politics and religious power under Bolsonaro. In admittedly schematic and preliminary terms, he discusses the historical process by which Brazilian evangelicals in general went from accepting a position as junior partners in a broad governing coalition led by the PT in the past decade and a half to asserting themselves as an indispensable pillar of the Bolsonaro administration.

“Brazil’s Cultural Battleground: Public Universities and the New Right,” by Juliano Fiori and Pedro Fiori Arantes, proposes that public universities, sites of cultivation of a new moral radicalism of the left in recent decades, have become a primary cultural battleground. It contends that since assuming the presidency Bolsonaro has used the machinery of government to wage culture warfare. It explores the attacks on public universities (demonization of professors and curriculum content, unconstitutional government interference, budget cuts, and political persecution) through which Bolsonaro’s government nurtured the reactionary imagination of Brazil’s new right and challenged the cultural hegemony of the left. It argues that in so doing Bolsonaro was breaking with a biopolitical pact that tied public universities to the defense of a right to life.

Thiago Pezzuto, in “Blowtorching Freirean Thought Out of Bolsonaro’s Brazil: Alagoas’s Escola Livre Law,” draws on punctuated-equilibrium theory to analyze a state law that prevents teachers from sharing opinions with their students that are political, partisan, religious, or philosophical in nature. Pezzuto argues that the return of the right in Latin America, the rise of evangelicals in Brazil, and the School Without Party (Escola Sem Partido) movement changed the shape of educational policy. He insists that the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 offered a more favorable climate for the consideration of the Escola Livre law. He places special emphasis on the role of Bolsonaro, who vowed to “blowtorch” the educator Paulo Freire’s thought out of Brazil’s Ministry of Education because of its ideological content.

In “The Movimento Brasil Livre and the Brazilian New Right in the Election of Jair Bolsonaro,” Marcelo Burgos Pimentel dos Santos, Claudio Luis de Camargo Penteado, and Rafael de Paula Aguiar Araújo analyze the uses of information and communication technologies by one of the exponents of the new Brazilian right that emerged after the June 2013 protests, supported the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and helped elect Jair Bolsonaro. They argue that through the strategic use of social networks, the MBL helped to expand a conservative agenda in line with what is happening in various parts of the world. The research evaluates the movement’s mobilization strategies in recent years, assessing its communicative power, its capacity to produce engagement, and its mobilization power. The results indicate that its use of information and communication techologies has led to the emergence of new political actors on the Brazilian right.

Laís Forti Thomaz and Tullo Vigevani analyze the relationship between Brazil and the United States under Bolsonaro in “Bolsonaro’s Subservience to Trump, 2019 and 2020: A Demanding Agenda and Limited Reciprocity.” They hypothesize that Brazilian demands found little reciprocity on the part of the United States, frustrating any strategic gains. Examining current views of Brazilian foreign policy through six case studies, they conclude that decision makers have compromised their bargaining power in order to consolidate their internal power, profoundly altering the historical principles linked to the interests of the Brazilian state.

Last but not least, Feliciano de Sá Guimarães, Davi Cordeiro Moreira, Irma Dutra de Oliveira e Silva, and Anna Carolina Rapaso de Mello, in “Conspiracy Theories and Foreign Policy Narratives: Globalism in Jair Bolsonaro’s Foreign Policy,” analyze more than 2,041 speeches and social media posts on foreign policy issues by four cabinet members of Bolsonaro’s government from January 2019 to December 2020 to understand whether Brazil's foreign policy narrative has adopted a conspiracy theory called “globalism” and, if so, under what circumstances. Conspiracy theorists explain current events in terms of a set of intrigues and stratagems carried out by fictitious enemies to undermine the national order. Thus, “globalism” assumes that international agencies and leftist China are trying to impose “cultural Marxism” on the “true people,” seen as nationalist, anticommunist, and Christian. The findings suggest that this conspiracy theory not only has taken root in Brazil’s foreign policy narrative but has been used consistently over time by the cabinet members responsible for Bolsonaro's foreign policy. The article also indicates that the use of “globalism” is not just a political strategy to convince voters but a worldview embedded in Bolsonaro’s far-right cabinet.

We hope that this ensemble of diverse and insightful works will help us to make better sense of the complexity of contemporary Brazilian history.