‘Apocalypse in the Tropics' is the democracy documentary Trump doesn't want you to see
On Monday, July 7, United States President Donald Trump, who disputed the results of the 2020 election that temporarily removed him from power, came to his defense.
'Brazil is doing a terrible thing on their treatment of former President Jair Bolsonaro,' Trump wrote on Truth Social. 'He is not guilty of anything, except having fought for THE PEOPLE. … LEAVE BOLSONARO ALONE!'
So yeah, Petra Costa's documentary ' Apocalypse in the Tropics ' — which not only details Bolsonaro's rise and fall but how democracies can be subverted and dismantled — is pretty timely.
It also provides a blueprint for reclaiming and strengthening democratic systems, which might be the main value for Americans viewers of the film, which opens Friday, July 11, at Landmark's Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco and streams on Netflix beginning Monday, July 14.
Costa, who explored the threat to democracy in Brazil in her 2019 documentary 'The Edge of Democracy,' also on Netflix, doesn't shy away from drawing parallels between Bolsonaroism and Trumpism.
Bolsonaro moved hard to the right and was embraced by Brazil's Evangelical Christian movement on his way to ascending to the presidency in 2018. When he got to power, he set about remaking the government by weakening its institutions, including Brazil's Supreme Court.
Costa also accuses the president of bungling the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a contentious re-election campaign in 2022 in which he squared off against rival and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
But Costa also delves into the history of democratic and socialist movements in Latin and South America that hoped to narrow socio-economic gaps. Key players include former U.S. President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as well as none other than Evangelical Christian leader Billy Graham, who spoke at a massive rally in Brazil in 1974 while the country was under a military dictatorship.
'What is certain is that Brazil became a laboratory for a brutal form of capitalism and vertiginous social inequality where millions of people began to seek the hope they needed in the Evangelical faith,' Costa narrates in the film.
In the last four decades, Costa reports, the percentage of Brazilians who identify as Evangelical Christian has risen from 5% to 30%, significantly boosting Bolsonaro's political appeal. In his 2022 campaign against Bolsonaro, da Silva embraced Evangelical social issues, noting in one campaign speech that abortion and all-gender restrooms 'came straight out of Satan's mind.'
At the heart of 'Apocalypse in the Tropics,' though, isn't so much current events but a longing to return to old ideals. A consistent thread is the conception of Brazil's capital of Brasilia as a utopian seat of government, architecturally embracing the three branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — as separate but equal checks and balances.
There's a lot of old footage from the 1950s of Brasilia being designed and built, which reveal this detail: Original plans had a church at the center of the design, as nearly all Brazilian cities and towns have. But it was removed to establish the idea of a separation of church and state.
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Los Angeles Times
10 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Trump's politically motivated sanctions against Brazil strain relations among old allies
SAO PAULO — President Trump has made clear who his new Latin America priority is: former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a personal and political ally. In doing so, he has damaged one of the Western hemisphere's most important and long-standing relationships, by levying 50% tariffs that begin to take effect Wednesday on the largest Latin America economy, sanctioning its main justice and bringing relations between the two countries to the lowest point in decades. The White House has appeared to embrace a narrative pushed by Bolsonaro allies in the U.S., that the former Brazilian president's prosecution for attempting to overturn his 2022 election loss is part of a 'deliberate breakdown in the rule of law,' with the government engaging in 'politically motivated intimidation' and committing 'human rights abuses,' according to Trump's statement announcing the tariffs. The message was clear earlier, when Trump described Bolsonaro's prosecution by Brazil's Supreme Court as a 'witch hunt' — using the same phrase he has employed for the numerous investigations he has faced since his first term. Bolsonaro faces charges of orchestrating a coup attempt to stay in power after losing the 2022 election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. A conviction could come in the next few months. The U.S. has a long history of meddling with the affairs of Latin American governments, but Trump's latest moves are unprecedented, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University. 'This is a personalistic government that is adopting policies according to Trump's whims,' Levitsky said. Bolsonaro's sons, he noted, have close connections to Trump's inner circle. The argument has been bolstered by parallels between Bolsonaro's prosecution and the attempted prosecution of Trump for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss, which ended when he won his second term last November. 'He's been convinced Bolsonaro is a kindred spirit suffering a similar witch hunt,' Levitsky said. After Bolsonaro's defeat in 2022, Trump and his supporters echoed his baseless election fraud claims, treating him as a conservative icon and hosting him at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, recently told Brazil's news website UOL that the U.S. would lift tariffs if Bolsonaro's prosecution were dropped. Meeting that demand, however, is impossible for several reasons. Brazilian officials have consistently emphasized that the judiciary is independent. The executive branch, which manages foreign relations, has no control over Supreme Court justices, who in turn have stated they won't yield to political pressure. On Monday, the court ordered that Bolsonaro be placed under house arrest for violating court orders by spreading messages on social media through his sons' accounts. Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversees the case against Bolsonaro, was sanctioned under the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which is supposed to target serious human rights offenders. De Moraes has argued that defendants were granted full due process and said he would ignore the sanctions and continue his work. 'The ask for Lula was undoable,' said Bruna Santos of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C., about dropping the charges against Bolsonaro. 'In the long run, you are leaving a scar on the relationship between the two largest democracies in the hemisphere.' Three key factors explain the souring of U.S.-Brazil ties in recent months, said Oliver Stuenkel, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: growing alignment between the far-right in both countries; Brazil's refusal to cave to tariff threats; and the country's lack of lobbying in Washington. Lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro's third son, has been a central figure linking Brazil's far-right with Trump's MAGA movement. He took a leave from Brazil's Congress and moved to the U.S. in March, but he has long cultivated ties in Trump's orbit. Eduardo openly called for Magnitsky sanctions against de Moraes and publicly thanked Trump after the 50% tariffs were announced in early July. Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, author of the Magnitsky Act, which allows the U.S. to sanction individual foreign officials who violate human rights, called the administration's actions 'horrible.' 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That began to change last year when billionaire Elon Musk clashed with de Moraes over censorship on X and threatened to defy court orders by pulling its legal representative from Brazil. In response, de Moraes suspended the social media platform from operating in the country for a month and threatened operations of another Musk company, Starlink. In the end, Musk blinked. Fábio de Sá e Silva, a professor of international and Brazilian studies at the University of Oklahoma, said Eduardo's influence became evident in May 2024, when he and other right-wing allies secured a hearing before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. 'It revealed clear coordination between Bolsonaro supporters and sectors of the U.S. Republican Party,' he said. 'It's a strategy to pressure Brazilian democracy from the outside.' Brazil has a diplomatic tradition of maintaining a low-key presence in Washington, Stuenkel said. That vacuum created an opportunity for Eduardo Bolsonaro to promote a distorted narrative about Brazil among Republicans and those closest to Trump. 'Now Brazil is paying the price,' he said. After Trump announced sweeping tariffs in April, Brazil began negotiations. President Lula and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin — Brazil's lead trade negotiator — said they have held numerous meetings with U.S. trade officials since then. Lula and Trump have never spoken, and the Brazilian president has repeatedly said Washington ignored Brazil's efforts to negotiate ahead of the tariffs' implementation. Privately, diplomats say they felt the decisions were made inside the White House, within Trump's inner circle — a group they had no access to. A delegation of Brazilian senators traveled to Washington in the final week of July in a last-ditch effort to defuse tensions. 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Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Fox News gets inside look at Gaza humanitarian situation as Israel weighs next steps
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New York Post
39 minutes ago
- New York Post
Young adults are less likely to follow politics or say voting is important, new AP poll shows
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mairekk Griffiths, a 26-year-old cook in a Denver suburb, doesn't think he'll ever pay a lot of attention to U.S. politics unless radical change happens. 'If another party was likely to win, I'd be interested in that,' said Griffiths, who voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year's presidential race but, like many his age, does not see voting as that valuable. 'I can't say either way that voting matters,' Griffiths said. 'It's just picking the least bad option. That's what I remember my whole life — both sides are bad, but this side is less bad.' 3 College students at a voter registration table. AP Young people such as Griffiths are less engaged with U.S. politics than older Americans and less likely to say voting is important, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Young people — even those who follow politics closely — are less likely to say issues such as the economy, government spending and health care are 'extremely important' to them than comparable older adults. The findings point to a broad sense of disillusionment among younger people about the country's political system — even if, like Griffiths, they still end up casting a ballot. Alberto Medina, who leads the Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement at Tufts University, which studies youth and politics, noted that turnout among young people hit record levels in the 2020 election and was high last year. 'There's a sense that democracy isn't working for young people. There's a lack of belief that democracy is even able to improve their lives,' Medina said. 'At the same time, we have been living in an era of high youth voting.' Disengagement from political parties and politics In another sign of their general estrangement from politics, the poll shows young adults are more likely to reject political party labels. About one-third of adults under age 30 identify as political independents who don't lean toward either major political party, compared with 17% of Americans age 60 or older. The poll also finds young people are far less likely to follow politics closely than older adults are. 3 In another sign of their general estrangement from politics, the poll shows young adults are more likely to reject political party labels. AP Only about 2 in 10 of adults under age 30 say they follow U.S. politics 'extremely' or 'very' closely, compared with about one-third of Americans overall. That's even higher among adults age 60 or older — 45% of this group says they follow U.S. politics at least very closely. Disengagement is higher among teenagers, with an AP-NORC poll from May finding 44% of teens ages 13 to 17 report following U.S. politics 'not very closely' or 'not closely at all.' Meanwhile, about two-thirds of adults under age 30 say it's 'extremely' or 'very' important to vote, compared with almost 9 in 10 over age 45 who say it's at least 'very' important to vote. Some of these habits could shift as people grow older. Younger people traditionally are less likely to vote than older people, and voter participation tends to go up with age. It's possible that engagement with politics could follow a similar pattern. Brittany Diaz, 28, follows politics closely for an unusual reason: Her oldest son, who is 7, is obsessed with the news and watches it every night. Diaz, a Republican who lives in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, suburb, acknowledges that she's unusual among her age group because she decided to start paying attention to politics when she had her first child at 20. 'Now that I have kids, I'm like, 'I need to care,'' she said. In closely following politics, Diaz is different from many other women under 30. Women in her age group are less likely than young men to say they follow U.S. politics, the poll finds. About one-quarter of men under 30 say they follow politics 'extremely' or 'very' closely, compared with 16% of women in the same age group. And about 4 in 10 young women say they follow U.S. politics 'not very closely' or 'not closely at all' compared with about a quarter of young men. Lower investment in key issues On a few issues, such as the economy and health care, the divide between the youngest and oldest Americans isn't large. About 8 in 10 Americans under age 30 say the economy is 'extremely' or 'very' important to them personally, compared with about 9 in 10 Americans age 60 or older. 3 In closely following politics, Diaz is different from many other women under 30. AP But older adults are much likelier to say topics that have taken center stage during the first six months of President Donald Trump's second term — including immigration and government spending — are 'extremely' or 'very' important to them personally compared with Americans under 30. That's even true for topics such as the situation in the Middle East, which has become a rallying cry for young activists since the Israel-Hamas war broke out. Only about 4 in 10 adults under 30 say this is highly important to them personally, compared with about 6 in 10 Americans age 60 or older. For some, that lack of interest could be related to a sense that the political system doesn't respond to their needs. At 18, Blake Marlar is just starting to pay attention to politics. As Trump's tax cut and spending bill moved through the Republican-controlled Congress, the aspiring geology major at the University of Nebraska emailed his state's two senators, both Republicans, objecting to its Medicaid cuts and increases in immigration enforcement funding. 'They didn't seem to take me seriously,' Marlar said. 'While I recognize they have to represent the whole state and the whole state doesn't agree with me, it could have been a different experience.' But he's resolved not to give up on politics: 'In the future,' he said, 'I'll do my part and vote.'
