Forrest Hylton

On 28 December, Luis Fernando ‘el Macho’ Camacho, the governor of Bolivia’s wealthy lowland department of Santa Cruz, was arrested and flown to La Paz, where a judge remanded him in custody. He will spend the next four months in Chonchocoro prison, pending trial for his part in the October 2019 coup. Camacho declared himself proud to have taken part in ‘the greatest struggle in history’. The Catholic Church called his arrest a ‘kidnapping’ and claimed that no coup had taken place in 2019. On 30 December, Jair Bolsonaro boarded the Brazilian presidential plane for the last time, on his way to Orlando, Florida.

Along with Roslyn and Howard Zinn, and Carol and Noam Chomsky, Alice and Staughton Lynd belonged to a generation of radical married couples in the United States who took controversial, unpopular public stands – on Civil Rights at home, on Vietnam and subsequent wars abroad – regardless of the consequences, and held fast to lifelong commitments. Staughton died last week, at the age of 92. ‘I lost my opportunity to make a living as a teacher when I tried to go all-out to stop the Vietnam War,’ he said in 2009.

‘Tá na hora de Jair/arrumar mala e já ir/já ir embora’ (‘It’s time for Jair [Bolsonaro] to pack his bags and go’). All week long, the song kept playing, people kept singing it – waiters, street sweepers, doormen and women, shop assistants, rubbish collectors – and according to word on the beach at Porto da Barra in Salvador da Bahia on Monday morning, it was number two on Spotify. You hear it everywhere. More than any other city and state in Brazil, Salvador and Bahia vote for Lula, not Bolsonaro, who has never won a single district in the country’s third-largest city; Bolsonaro lost the state by 3.75 million votes, with Lula taking 72.1 per cent. When the sun set on Sunday, at roughly 5.30 p.m., Rio Vermelho in Salvador was a sea of people, expectant and dressed in red, waving white banners, awaiting the results of the most important presidential elections in anyone’s lifetime – perhaps the most important the world has seen this century.

Mike Davis’s work reached my generation of radical readers in the 1990s, in the context of the fall of the USSR, the rise of Clintonist third-way triage, the EZLN in Chiapas, and the interpenetration of capital across the Pacific. I caught onto him in Portland, Oregon. There was something in his writing that had the immediacy and raw rage of punk or hip hop. He spoke to us in a way that few of his generation could have, because he was listening so closely to young people, especially as he patrolled the meaner streets of LA to learn about them, comparing what he knew of previous generations in the city to what he was hearing from the young and imagining for their future. Throughout the time I knew him personally, for most of the last two decades, he maintained his sense of urgent responsibility and debt towards the generations coming after him, and even a certain optimism about defining democratically feasible and ecologically sustainable forms of social transformation.

In Brazil, where Christopher Columbus is not well known, 12 October is a federal holiday in honour of children, as well as an important day in the Brazilian Catholic religious calendar, with a pilgrimage in São Paulo to the sanctuary of Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida. The statue was supposedly discovered in a river in São Paulo’s interior by three fishermen in 1717, who were blessed by abundant catches thereafter. Though she started out white, the river turned her black; or perhaps it was the smoke from the fishermen’s votive candles. In any event, she is a powerful symbol of liberty for the Afro-descended majority, in a country where slavery formally ended only in 1888.