Jul 3 2026| Nº. 212

Editorial

Brazil’s evangelical community returned to the center of the country’s political debate this week, not only because of its electoral importance, but also due to growing signs that its leadership is undergoing a process of reorganization ahead of the 2026 presidential succession.

The public dispute between Senator Flávio Bolsonaro and former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro has moved well beyond the confines of the Bolsonaro family. Michelle’s decision to step down from the leadership of the PL Mulher organization, together with public statements by prominent evangelical leaders, suggests that the dispute has reached one of Bolsonaroism’s most important political assets: its strong connection with the evangelical electorate. The public appeal by Congressman and Pastor Marco Feliciano urging Flávio Bolsonaro to contain the growing tensions within the religious community illustrates the concern among part of the evangelical leadership about the political consequences of these internal divisions.

At the same time, recent developments involving prominent evangelical figures have further increased public attention on this religious and political sphere. Investigations involving institutions linked to Bishop Edir Macedo and the arrest of Pastor Márcio Poncio have once again highlighted the complex intersections between religion, politics, economic power, and judicial accountability. Although these episodes are distinct in nature and should not be treated as equivalent phenomena, both contribute to increased public scrutiny of a sector that continues to exert significant influence over Brazil’s political life. Their ability to preserve unity within this constituency may prove to be one of the decisive factors shaping the opposition’s electoral prospects in the next presidential election.

Highlights

• Betting. Since the start of the soccer World Cup, nearly 35% of Brazilians have placed cash bets on the new betting platforms. Before the tournament began, that figure was no higher than 11%. In addition to the rise in the number of bettors, the amount wagered has also increased. On average, each Brazilian participating in these games spent R$ 272; prior to the competition, that figure stood at R$ 188. CazéTV, one of the main broadcasters for the tournament's matches, is under investigation for suspected abusive practices in the promotion of betting. While casino games and even bingo are prohibited by law in Brazil, major foreign and domestic soccer betting companies found a legislative loophole and have become the driving force behind soccer-related advertising in the country.

• Debt. The default rate on credit operations recorded by Brazilian banks hit a historic high in May, reaching 4.7%—an increase of 0.1 percentage points from the previous month. Household debt, combined with high interest rates, has been a major issue for the national economy—a problem the government is attempting to tackle through initiatives like the “Desenrola” program, which allows debtors to renegotiate payments under more favorable terms. The default rate stands at 5.6% for individuals and 3.2% for businesses.

• Weapon 1. The Federal District Civil Police informed the Supreme Court that it finds no criminal violation in the incident where former President Jair Bolsonaro was found to be keeping a firearm at home while under house arrest. The weapon was discovered when one of Bolsonaro’s security guards was stopped at a random police checkpoint while transporting the item for maintenance. The Prosecutor General's Office now has 48 hours to weigh in on the matter as the prosecuting authority. Subsequently, the former president's defense team will have the same amount of time to respond. The Supreme Court may ultimately decide to maintain or revoke the house arrest. If revoked, Bolsonaro would return to serving his sentence at the Papuda prison.

• Weapon 2. Italian courts have overturned the decision allowing the extradition to Brazil of Italian-Brazilian former congresswoman Carla Zambelli. She had been convicted in Brazil for chasing a left-wing activist through the streets of São Paulo while brandishing a firearm. Following her conviction, Zambelli fled to Italy. The Italian court's decision does not address the merits of the case itself, but rather the extradition request, which will now be reviewed by a higher authority at the Rome Court of Appeal. In another case involving the congresswoman, Italy denied extradition, ruling that the presiding judge, Alexandre de Moraes, could not simultaneously act as both victim and judge in the same case, which concerned Zambelli's involvement in a hacking attack on the National Council of Justice (CNJ) systems, where a fake arrest warrant against Moraes was fabricated and fraudulently signed in his name.

News from the Alliance and partner organizations

Cerrado. In June, the trade of traditional herbalists (raizeiras and raizeiros) in the Cerrado biome was recognized as Cultural Heritage of Brazil by Iphan’s Consultative Council on Cultural Heritage. This measure recognizes, preserves, and values ​​the practices of care, healing, and medicinal plant management passed down through generations within Indigenous, Quilombola, Geraizeira, Vazanteira, and other Cerrado communities. The decision also highlights the direct link between knowledge, territory, and biodiversity, as the herbalists' practices rely on the living biome—its plants, water sources, veredas (wetland palm groves), home gardens, and communal ways of sharing knowledge. Protecting this knowledge must center on the communities' ways of life and their own health systems, particularly in a context marked by encroaching deforestation and the loss of territories.

Caatinga. Communities, social organizations, researchers, public officials, and grassroots movements participated in the second Caatinga Climate Week, held from July 1 to 3 in Pernambuco. The event seeks to change how the Caatinga is portrayed in Brazil and around the world, shifting the image of the Semiarid region—often defined solely by drought and scarcity—to present the Caatinga as a territory of life, knowledge, resilience, and climate solutions. The program featured debates on topics such as agroecology, water security, living in harmony with the Semiarid environment, traditional and African-descendant communities, quilombolas, Indigenous peoples, family farming, and local knowledge. The theme "Rewriting the Caatinga: Communication, Climate, and Identity" uniquely encapsulated the event's purpose by addressing communication regarding this biome through the lens of its territories, the people who inhabit them, and their lived experiences.

IACHR. The Office of the Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural, and Environmental Rights (REDESCA) of the IACHR has published its 2025 Annual Report, featuring a regional assessment of the main challenges to guaranteeing these rights in the Americas. The document organizes its analysis around four key areas: the climate emergency and the environment; business and human rights; economic and fiscal policies; and democracy. The report notes that the climate crisis, environmental degradation, the expansion of extractive activities, and pressure on territories disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples as well as Afro-descendant, rural, and coastal communities. It also highlights illegal gold mining as a critical issue within the current extractive phase, linking it to contamination, illicit economies, and severe impacts on health, water resources, and the environment.

Reactionary Politics. On July 30 at 6:30 PM, sociologist Jorge Branco—an advisor to the Instituto Novos Paradigmas and the Brazil Office—will launch his book “Quando a Direita Mudou: A Ascenção do Reacionarismo no Brasil” (When the Right Changed: The Rise of Reactionary Politics in Brazil) in the Araucária Room at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Cultural Center. In the book, he analyzes the growth and consolidation of the reactionary movement within the national political landscape, offering readers tools to understand how discourses once considered marginal gained momentum and began to vie for the center stage of public debate.

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Article

Are We a Society Without Memory?

By Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako*

 One often hears it said that Brazil is a country without memory. This narrative circulates among progressive groups and voices of various stripes. It serves to explain everything from the difficulty of punishing crimes committed during the dictatorship to the 2016 coup against Dilma Rousseff and the political rise of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. We argue that this premise is false. Brazil is not a country without memory; rather, it is a country where memory regarding the dictatorship is contested, internally contradictory, and politically consequential.

 Since the 1990s, the Brazilian state—prodded by civil society movements—has built, step by step, an institutional framework aimed at acknowledging the crimes of the dictatorship. The Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances, established in 1995, was the first step. By the mid-2000s, the Amnesty Commission had assumed immense political significance. Under the leadership of Paulo Abrão, it redefined the meaning of reparation: shifting away from the image of a magnanimous state forgiving subversives, it came to embody a state that asked forgiveness of the persecuted and hinted at the need to hold their persecutors accountable. Each step in this direction was met with growing unease by the Armed Forces, which since the 1980s had struggled to coexist with the denunciations made by "Torture Never Again" groups and the work carried out by the families of those killed or disappeared for political reasons.

 Military commanders reached the limit of their institutional tolerance in December 2009, when the 3rd National Human Rights Program recommended the creation of a truth commission to investigate crimes committed during the dictatorship. Together with Defense Minister Nelson Jobim, they threatened a collective resignation, precipitating one of the major crises of the Lula administration. Pragmatic and nearing the end of his term, the president moved quickly to smooth things over: he bypassed the impasse with a new decree and adjustments to the text.

 It fell to President Dilma Rousseff in December 2012 to create the National Truth Commission and, with it, “a monumental chasm between the Armed Forces and the Presidency of the Republic,” as General Sérgio Etchegoyen described it. For the first time, the State investigated crimes committed during the dictatorship and named torturers. For the military, this was the last straw in an already fragile relationship with a government that, in the general’s words, “flouted values ​​and customs held dear by us in the military.”

 Starting in 2013 the military’s counter-narrative regarding memory ceased to be merely a matter for the barracks. The green-and-yellow protests that emerged that year—and intensified in 2014 and 2015—demanded the restoration of an imagined, lost order: moral, sexual, and familial. Celebrating the dictatorship ceased to be the exclusive domain of radical circles and became a central element of the conservative Brazilian self-image, both within political parties and in civil society. When Jair Bolsonaro dedicated his vote for the impeachment of President Rousseff to “the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra”—the president’s own personal “terror”—he symbolically inaugurated a public morality anchored in the celebration of the dictatorship. He was no lone wolf, and his outburst was not improvised. It was the crystallization of an anti-memory that had long been gestating, both inside and outside military circles.

 However, the institutionalization of memory policies did more than wound military pride and push generals onto the anti-democratic stage. These policies—and the military outcry surrounding them—also left their mark on how Brazilians imagine the past.

 A Datafolha poll from December 2014 shows that 32% of the population “did not know” whether the country’s authoritarian legacy was positive or negative. In 2019, the share of those with no opinion dropped to just 12%. Among those with a formed opinion, about 60% viewed the military’s time in power as having more negative than positive achievements, while 30% recalled or imagined the dictatorship in a positive light. These data do not describe a country without memory; they describe a country with a fractured and contested memory.

 Another intriguing finding concerns the (lack of) knowledge regarding Institutional Act No. 5, which implemented a serious of authoritarian and anti-democratic measures in December 1968. Four decades later, In 2008, only 18% of Brazilians had heard of it. Not coincidentally, following the National Truth Commission and the various truth commissions that swept across the country, 35% of respondents in 2019 stated they were familiar with the act that radicalized the dictatorship. This represented a significant doubling of awareness during a period when the electorate was gradually shifting toward the right and center-right—a time when these two labels combined accounted for an unprecedented 40% of respondents.

 However, these figures and markers do not form coherent patterns. Within the same social fabric, the majority condemnation of torture coexists with nostalgia for the “order” and “development” attributed to the military governments. We argue that the military’s reaction to the memory policies implemented since the return to democracy was one of the root causes of the 2016 parliamentary coup against President Rousseff. Yet, it was not the only one. By contesting the past institutionally, these policies also reshaped the actors and forces vying for it, thereby summoning counter-memories.

 By engaging in an institutional contest over the past, these policies also reshaped the actors and forces vying for it, eliciting counter-memories that extended beyond the barracks and became far-reaching political fuel. Thus, celebratory memory of the dictatorship is far from a form of ignorance; rather, it is a political product translated into representations and imaginings of a lost order.

 *Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako are the authors of  Disputing Pasts: Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2026). Cristina is a professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, and José is a researcher at the Institute of Social and Political Studies (IESP-UERJ) and INCT-Participa. José is also a co-coordinator of the Center for Democracy and Collective Action (NDAC-Cebrap) and holds research fellowships from CNPq, FAPERJ, and Prociência (UERJ).

External articles express the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Brazilian Alliance or the editors of the bulletin.