Forrest Hylton

Bolsonaro shares Putin’s loathing of communism and the USSR, and tries to associate Lula and the PT with both. That didn’t stop him, during his recent junket to Moscow, paying tribute to the Red Army’s victory over the Nazis in the Second World War; a position all the more incoherent because neo-Nazis have occupied prominent places in Bolsonaro’s administration.

When the coup that overthrew Evo Morales in 2019 brought an unknown senator and political newcomer, Jeanine Áñez, to the Bolivian presidency, the Brazilian government was the first to offer official recognition. In the run up to the coup, one of the leading plotters, Fernando ‘Macho’ Camacho, currently the governor of Santa Cruz, met with Brazil’s foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo.

The holiday season hit Brazil like a tsunami: on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, after five years of record drought, two dams burst, as record rains and flooding put at least 116 communities underwater, killed 21 people, displaced at least 50,000, affected more than 417,000, and destroyed infrastructure (and vaccines) throughout southern Bahia; a flu epidemic broke out nationwide at the moment that Omicron arrived. The unseasonal rains led to an increase in mosquitos: though Zika and dengue fever numbers are still down, Chikungunya is way up.

It’s just over two years since former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was freed from jail, and eight months since he was declared innocent of all charges brought against him. As Brazil heads towards elections in October 2022, with the economy in recession, Lula holds a commanding lead over his electoral rivals, President Jair Bolsonaro and his former justice minister, Sergio Moro – the judge who put Lula in jail. But anything could happen between now and election day, especially since Donald Trump’s political star appears to be waxing again. Bolsonaro – who once said to Trump in public, unsolicited and unrequited, ‘I love you’ – has long taken the former US president as a role model.

As the Covid-19 pandemic abates in Salvador da Bahia, beneath a surface of relaxed tranquillity – the comedian Gregorio Duvivier calls it ‘positividade tóxica’ – run deep currents of fear, tension and violent terror: they are not new, but they have intensified. On weekend afternoons, a military police helicopter hovers over bathers in the water at Porto da Barra beach, shuttling back and forth between the Porto and the Farol da Barra. It’s part of ‘Operation Peace’.