Lula

On Sunday evening Miami’s Freedom Tower filled with Brazilian expatriate supporters of Flávio Bolsonaro, there for an election watch party. The headliners were Eduardo Bolsonaro, the candidate’s brother, and Paulo Figueiredo, a popular Brazilian YouTuber. Both men effectively live in exile in the United States, since going home would mean facing the courts.  For the Bolsonarists the setting was appropriate. In the 1960s the tower processed Cubans fleeing Castro, and for many in Miami’s Cuban community the building is their Ellis Island. The room was buoyant. Flávio had finished first in the first round, and he would surely pick up the dissident right who had backed smaller conservative candidates three weeks earlier. The early numbers favored him.

The “Trump of the Tropics,” former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, was indicted Tuesday for falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination status for his Florida vacation. The indictment is the first faced by the conservative leader, who has already been barred from running for office. More are headed his way, in what he is describing as a lawfare effort spearheaded by President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The indictment was signed by Detective Fábio Alvarez Shor, who says in his report that the former president and his aides “issue[d] their respective [vaccination] certificates and use[d] them to cheat current health restrictions.

Despite being the world’s fourth largest democracy, Brazil was barely on the radar for most Americans until the meteoric rise of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign caught attention because of the perceived similarities between him and Donald Trump. Many observers, including the Brazilian-American journalist Glenn Greenwald, argued this comparison was overstated. Yet while Trump and Bolsonaro may be quite different, the recent trajectory of Brazilian politics has been strikingly similar to that of its North American ally.