Lucas Amorim is a PhD candidate at the Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo (IRI-USP), Professor of International Relations at Unisagrado, and Associate Researcher at the Brazilian Observatory on U.S. Politics (OPEU/INCT-INEU). He was previously a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University Law Center (2024–2025). His research focuses on international institutions and regimes, international political economy, international investment law, and sustainable development.

Leif Grünewald is a philosopher and professor at the Universidade do Estado do Pará (Brazil), where he works in undergraduate Philosophy and in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies. His research lies at the intersection of political philosophy, philosophy of language, and contemporary critical theory, with particular attention to ambiguity, democratic discourse, and emerging forms of authoritarianism. He has published and taught on topics ranging from German philosophy and political ontology to myth, memory, and conceptual regimes in the Global South. His current work examines Brazil–United States relations through the lens of the so called “fascism of ambiguity” in contemporary democracies.

Natalia Figueiredo is a Brazilian lawyer and policy specialist with over eight years of experience working at the intersection of democracy, public policy, and environmental justice. Her work focuses on the internationalization of environmental agendas and the defense of the Cerrado and Caatinga, particularly where ecological degradation intersects with structural inequality and democratic governance. She holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Legal Theory, grounded in human rights and feminist perspectives. Currently, she operates at the interface of research, advocacy, and institutional engagement, producing analysis to strengthen democratic institutions and environmental protection for historically marginalized territories.

Erica Capecchi is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. Her research analyses how far-right movements use digital media, visual culture, and online propaganda to influence public debate and democratic processes across national contexts. Initially centred on Italy, her work now examines transnational dynamics between Europe and Brazil, contributing to broader discussions on democracy, political communication, and the global circulation of extremist narratives. Interdisciplinary in approach, she bridges cultural analysis and digital media research to inform academic, policy, and public understanding. She has presented internationally and is currently developing her first monograph.

Gabriel Silva Collins is a PhD student in UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. After working on projects in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico, his dissertation now focuses on contemporary archaeology in the caatinga thorn forests of Bahia, Brazil. Gabriel looks at how members of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) interact with caatinga environments that are seen as essential supporters in fights to claim land: a viewpoint that ties into Brazilian histories such as the 19th-century War of Canudos. Gabriel is a U.S.-Brazilian dual citizen and engages with the caatinga as both a research subject and a landscape of familial history. 

Carmen Hein de Campos holds a Ph.D. in Criminal Sciences (PUCRS). She is a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in Law at the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) and a Collaborating Professor in the Graduate Program in Law at Centro Universitário Autônomo do Brasil (UniBrasil). She serves as General Coordinator of Red ALAS – the Latin American Network of Legal Scholars. Her research focuses on democracy, gender, and legal conservatism. She is co-editor of the book Neoconservatisms and Anti-Gender Ideologies in Latin America (Lumen Juris, 2024).

David Nemer is Associate Professor of Media Studies and director of Latin American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology (GSA, 2013). Nemer has a PhD in Computing, Culture, and Society from Indiana University, a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Virginia and in Computer Science from Saarland University. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center and an Affiliated Scholar at Princeton University’s Brazil Lab. Nemer has written for The Guardian, El País, HuffPost, Salon, The Intercept, and CartaCapital.

Maria G. Gatti holds a PhD from Harvard University and was a researcher at the Joint Center for History and Economics (University of Cambridge), the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (Harvard). For her historical research on Brazil-US networks of censorship and propaganda, she received the NECLAS Best Article Prize and honorable mention for the LASA Brazil Section Best Dissertation Prize. She is working on her book, "Double Agent," and serves as a consultant for Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Organization of Ibero-American States.

Marcos Arruda moved to Washington, D.C. in 1971 after a year in Brazilian prisons for his opposition to the regime. Many years later his mother, Lina Penna Sattamini, documented her son’s story in A Mother’s Cry: A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture Under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (Duke UP, 2000). Marcos co-founded the Committee against Repression in Brazil (CARIB) in Washington, D.C. and was an active national leader in the movement to denounce the dictatorship. A Washington Post interview about his torture experiences was a significant influence on the newspaper’s editorials against U.S. government’s support of the military regime.

Ralph Della Cava, as a professor of Latin American history at City University of New York, Queens, was a leading force in the movement against the Brazilian dictatorship throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Working behind the scenes to mobilize academics and activists to speak out against the gross violation of human rights in Brazil and other related issues, he co-founded American Friends of Brazil, helped prepare the first dossier in the United States about torture in Brazil, and organized the circulation of the first national petition, “We Cannot Remain Silent,” that denounced U.S. complicity with the military regime.

Dr. Margaret E. Crahan is a Senior Research Scholar and Director of the Cuba Program at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University. In 1970, she accompanied Brazilian exiled Congressmen Márcio Moreira Alves on a campus tour to denounce torture and repression in Brazil. In 2013 the government of Brazil recognized Dr. Crahan for her work on human rights, particularly in support of its return to democratic civilian government. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights and the Board of the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Ron Chilcote is the Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives, a theoretical and scholarly journal, founded in 1974, for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. The journal played a leading role in publishing scholarly works about the the socio-economic and political issues that Brazil faced during the dictatorship and afterward. Professor Emeritus of Economic and Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, he has also written several important books on Brazil including, Intellectuals and the Search for National Identity in Twentieth-century Brazil (Cambridge, 2010).

Timothy Harding is Professor Emeritus in Latin American history from California State University, Los Angeles and a member of the editorial collective of Latin American Perspectives. His doctoral dissertation from Stanford University on the history of Brazilian trade unions was an important study of the process of state-control over the labor movement before and during the military regime. In the 1970s and beyond, he played a leading role in solidarity activities with Brazil, sponsoring the visit of Brazilian exiles and other public oppositionists to Southern California to talk about the situation in the country.

Margaret Keck is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. In 1981, she and her husband Larry Wright founded the Brazilian Labor Information and Resource Center in Washington, D.C. that organized solidarity with the labor movement in Brazil among trade unionists in the United States. She is also the author of The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil (Yale, 1992), and co-author of Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy in International Politics (Cornell, 1998), Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Duke, 2007), and Practical Authority: Agency and Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics (Oxford, 2013).

Harry Strharsky co-founded the Committee Against Repression in Brazil (CARIB) in Washington, D.C. in 1971 to prepare a demonstration for the State visit of General Médici of Brazil with President Nixon and denounce U.S. complicity with Brazilian torture through a display of posters, theater, and song in Lafayette Park directly across from the White House. The Washington Post and national TV distributed these images throughout the country. CARIB also lobbied Congress to end US. support for the Brazilian dictatorship. Harry became the U.S correspondent for the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Brazil and helped merge CARIB into the Common Front for Latin America (COFFLA) in 1973.