Brazil once had the reputation of being the most Catholic country in the world. With the exception of General Ernesto Geisel, an evangelical Christian who ruled the country from 1974 to 1979 during the military dictatorship, Brazil has only ever had Catholic heads of state.

However, the upcoming presidential election on October 7 sees two candidates with an evangelical profile — Marina Silva and Jair Bolsonaro — vying for the highest office in the land.

Silva, an environmentalist, is a convert from Catholicism who joined an evangelical church several years ago. Bolsonaro, actually a devout Catholic and often called Brazil’s Donald Trump for his outrageous views and focus on law and order, was baptized in the Jordan River by an evangelical preacher in 2016.

For decades now, people have been flocking to Brazil’s Evangelical Protestant and Pentecostal churches. Around 42 million Brazilians (22 percent of the population) registered as “evangélicos” in the 2010 census, while around 123 million (64 percent) described themselves as Catholic.

Experts estimate the number of “evangélicos” is currently at around 30 percent, yet they are still politically underrepresented. A cross-party federation of evangelical politicians says only about 100 of the 513 representatives in the lower house of parliament belong to the “frente evangélica,” founded in 2003.

According to media reports, only five of the 81 senators in the upper house of Congress are evangelical.

Viable Competitors

In the upcoming election, that number could increase by at least 10 percent, “thanks to a good performance by the candidate Jair Bolsonaro,” said Ricardo Ismael, a political scientist at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. “What’s new is that the evangelicals are becoming viable competitors in elections to the executive branch.”

The election of Marcelo Crivella as mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016 set the pattern. Crivella, a bishop in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, had the might of a Pentecostal church behind him; it was founded by his uncle, Edir Macedo, who also owns a TV station called Rede Record.

Its pastors are reported to have drummed up support for Crivella in their sermons. It’s not known how much money the church contributed to his costly election campaign.

Not all evangelical candidates are backed by such rich, influential churches. But they are winning voters from the new lower middle class, whose numbers greatly increased under the government of the Workers’ Party, in power from 2003 to 2016. “Many low-income earners and lower-middle-class people felt the promises of the evangelical neo-Pentecostal churches spoke to them,” said Ismael.

Seeking Moral Rigor

Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto, of the Catholic University of São Paulo, sees the rise of the evangelicals as a consequence of the rural exodus in the second half of the 20th century. In the cities, this deeply religious rural population encountered a secularized, permissive, Catholic urban society — and took refuge in the morally stricter, more conservative and purist evangelical Pentecostal churches.

“For a population that was suffering in terrible living conditions, in shock at losing their traditional values and feeling lonely in the big cities, their message was very attractive,” he said.

In recent decades, this formerly rural population has been particularly successful in advancing economically to become part of the new middle class — and it now tends to vote for right-wing conservatives. Opinion polls show that evangelical voters are considerably less likely (6 percent) than Catholics (21 percent) to vote for left-wing parties.

“The Catholic discourse focuses more on social issues, the rights of the poorest in society,” said Borba Neto. “Meanwhile, the evangelical discourse — and particularly that of the neo-Pentecostal churches — concentrates on moral values.”

Evangelical Head of State?

Unlike the poorer classes, who depend on welfare assistance and tend to vote for the left wing, people who have moved up into the lower middle class no longer rely on aid directly provided by the state.

“The neo-Pentecostal churches occupy a hegemonic position in this new middle class, in which they concern themselves with moral values, fight against the lack of security in cities and call for an end to the welfare state — which is no longer relevant to their needs,” said Ismael.

Furthermore, he said, the vast majority of evangelical politicians reject the agenda of left-wing minorities. “The evangelical parliamentary group has positioned itself against a left-wing agenda that advocates more rights for minorities, for new family models calling for a debate around gender issues and the education system,” said Ismael. “It’s still too early to say whether they will be successful in blocking this agenda. But they do have the power and the influence to have a say.”

The latest presidential opinion polls show Bolsonaro in the lead at 28 percent, with Silva trailing far behind at 5 percent. “Bolsonaro reproduces evangelical sermons in his discourse, adopting a stance against the left-wing agenda in questions of traditions and customs,” said Ismael. “This is why he has such high approval ratings among evangelicals.”

Silva, on the other hand, doesn’t limit her discourse to evangelical sermons, instead putting an emphasis on social policy as well as environmental protection. “Oddly, Marina Silva is an ideal Catholic candidate, although she is divided in her views,” said Borba Neto. “She’s left-wing on social affairs, and closer to the right on issues of morality.”

Bolsonaro, by contrast, represents par excellence “the ambition of the new middle class. For both evangelicals and ultra-conservative Catholics, Bolsonaro is the populist alternative — a leader who professes that, if necessary, he’ll go it alone to deal with problems that cannot be resolved by democratic dialog.”

DW

Houtart was a Jesuit priest and prolific scholar on the faculty of sociology at the University of Louvain in Belgium.

His leadership in the dialogue between Marxism and Christianity, his research on religion in society from Sri Lanka to Nicaragua, and his desire to connect social movements in the global South through the Tricontinental Center (CETRI) which he founded in 1976, matched his academic output of some 50 books.

On the theological front, he assisted in drafting the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes or “Joy and Hope”), one of the most influential documents of the landmark Second Vatican Council.

Houtart was a hero to many around the world, but certainly no saint. In 2010, he terminated a global campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize when he admitted to sexually abusing an eight-year-old boy in 1970.

He is perhaps best remembered for his pioneering work on the analysis of, and resistance to, corporate economic globalization. Noting the pervasive influence of the World Economic Forum, he proposed the “Other Davos” in 1996, a counter movement against the mounting power of neoliberal economics.

Five years later, others including Chico Whitaker, a lay Catholic activist and secretary of the Commission of Justice and Peace of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil, built on Houtart’s initiatives to launch the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, an annual meeting place for alter-globalists seeking solidarity under the banner of “Another World is Possible!” Houtart served on its International Council.

Miguel D’Escoto served as a Maryknoll missionary priest in his native Nicaragua after his education and ordination in the USA. A liberation theologian, he joined Nicaragua’s Sandinista movement (FSLN) in the overthrow of the dictatorial Somoza regime and its resistance to the US-led “contra” war, serving in the Sandinista government – including as Foreign Minister between 1979 and 1990.

In 2008 he was elected president of the United Nations General Assembly. Though never entirely repudiated by the Vatican for his political work, he was suppressed for decades before being fully restored to his pastoral duties by Pope Francis in 2014.

Houtart and D’Escoto were both men of their times. In their generation, liberation was in the air through national movements against colonialism, through revolutions, and through New Left activism across the globe.

Following Vatican II’s “opening to the world” and the Church’s fresh engagement with modernity, Catholic priests, missionaries and lay leaders were free to pursue novel forms of ministry.

Such novel religious activism wasn’t entirely new. Brazilian Archbishop Hélder Câmara, the “bishop of the slums,” had taken a radical approach to his ministry to the poor a decade before Vatican II; and the antecedents to what would be called liberation theology had been building in both Catholic and Protestant circles for years.

But the 1968 meeting of Catholic bishops at the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM) in Medellín, Colombia, marked a turning point for the realignment of the church away from traditional social elites. Liberation theology was thus liberated to pursue its “preferential option for the poor.”

This movement spread powerfully through Latin America – and with assistance from Houtart and others, in Asia and Africa as well. But the epicenter was Latin America, where the movement aligned itself with other civil society groups in opposition to right-wing military dictatorships.

Among this generation, Roman Catholic theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez (now aged 89), Leonardo Boff (78) and Jon Sobrino (78), and the Methodist José Míguez Bonino (who died in 2012) are among the better known liberationists.

Many of their ideas were developed in association with Paulo Freire (who died in 1997), the Brazilian Christian educational activist, proponent of popular education, and author of the acclaimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Also part of this group was the Paraguayan Fernando Lugo (still young at 66), who was ordained a missionary priest by the Society of the Divine Word and returned home to become bishop of San Pedro where he was known as the “friend of the poor.”

In 2008 he was elected president of Paraguay, but impeached in 2012 in what neighboring countries called a “constitutional coup d’état.”

Why did this generation rise to prominence in Latin America? There are numerous reasons. For one, in the post-World War II period, some like Houtart in Belgium were radicalized by the plight of the European working class and challenged by its irreligiosity to find new ways of articulating and identifying with the poor.

This experience spread to Latin America almost accidentally, for the simple reason that Europe was oversupplied with priests and Latin America needed more of them; knowingly or not, Latin America imported radicalized priests in significant numbers. Latin American priests also studied in Europe, absorbing radical thinking. These influences played out in societies dominated by the Catholic faith.

But the larger reasons were twofold: first, the abject poverty of the Latin American majority which even the Vatican could no longer overlook; and second, the rise of oppressive military regimes and bitter political revolutions in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

The felt need for liberation among the poor, the marginalized and indigenous peoples was as palpable as it was necessary. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the struggle for liberation was very real.

Those days are gone. Democracy has returned to much of Latin America, as well as a more pragmatic form of social democracy, and liberation theology has lost some of its revolutionary raison d’être.

In his open and honest postmortem on the movement, the Belgian-Latin American José Comblin (who died in 2011) admits that in many ways the liberationists misinterpreted the life experience of the Latin American poor.

While they focused on rural peasants they overlooked migration to the cities. They also missed the mood of the campesinos’ popular religiosity, which trended strongly towards the Protestant and Pentecostal churches.

And they ignored the desire of the poor to become consumers. “The Catholics opted for the poor,” as the saying goes, but “the poor opted for the markets.”

Hence, liberation theology was but a moment. It was a particular theo-political response to a specific set of circumstances – a generation’s rebellion against grinding poverty in the killing fields of revolutionary Latin America. But the rich theology of the liberationists endures as a challenge to every church tradition.

Their analysis of the causes of poverty and how it is structured into prevailing global systems – recently articulated by Houtart in his 2011 manifesto From ‘Common Goods’ to the ‘Common Good of Humanity’ – challenges every church to open its eyes to the cold, hard analysis that’s required to grasp the changing world around them.

Is there anything else the rest of the world can learn from the liberationists?

In the West, the Protestant, Anglo-European North and the Catholic, Iberian South produced vastly different sociopolitical traditions, even though they share in common a white settler history of slave-holding, the suppression of indigenous peoples, and capitalist class exploitation.

If the South trends social-democratic and struggles against powerful conservative elites, the North trends liberal, towards laissez faire capitalism and expressive individualism. As it was framed in Latin America, liberation theology could never succeed in the North.

Nevertheless, it has many lessons to teach. The first lies in its consciousness – its willingness to flip the social script from catering to elites to privileging the poor.

Liberation theology was never only about theo-politics and revolution. It was also about overcoming alienation: the alienation that separates human beings from each other, people from the Earth, Western from pre-Western forms of life, and alienated psyches from transcendence.

It taught ordinary people to perceive the reality of their own circumstance – to conscientize themselves, as the liberationists put it – through their own self-reflection, so that they were free to construct a social reality that resisted the powers of the age.

Secondly, we can learn from its methodology, simple yet profound: “See–Judge–Act.” That is, live in the concrete world. Describe reality as it is, not simply as theory tells us. But also judge reality from the horizon of a reconciled humanity, and act accordingly to bring that reality about.

The liberationists put a lot of time into analysis, and that let them tell, in great detail, the hard truth that the world we have made is grinding others into the dust, and that this must stop, as much for our own salvation as for the wellbeing of others.

Third, we might even learn from its mistakes. To overlook popular religiosity – because intellectual and religious elites aren’t interested in the daily lives of the faithful, or because wealthy city dwellers forget rural life and laugh off its traditions, or because the successful classes denigrate the struggling classes and blame them for their own suffering – is to leave large segments of society without the material, intellectual, and spiritual resources to find their way in the world.

Lastly, we might learn to take our own churches more seriously. The liberationists believed in spiritual community, life-giving fellowship, and historical church structures to hold them together more than any religious movement that I’ve come across. They believed in a “new way of being church” – confident that the social power of faith can liberate societies as easily as it can oppress them.

Since the end of Soviet-style socialism in 1989, ‘alter-globalization’ rather than ‘liberation’ has come to define the radical imagination, but the problems of poverty and oppression persist – as does the possibility that we might draw again on the theo-political resources provided by a remarkable community of radical priests to inspire a new generation of alter-globalist activists and theologians.

Gregory Leffel, Ph.D., is a missiologist working on collective action, social movements and theo-politics, and is director of One Horizon Institute in Lexington, Kentucky. He is author of Faith Seeking Action: Mission, Social Movements, and the Church in Motion; and is past president of the American Society of Missiology.

This article appeared originally in Open Democracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/

Hummingbirds flashed around. The picture had faded into sepia, but when it was painted in the sixteen century it must have been a festival of color. The title was Brazil.

The Jesuits in the 15th century sent missionaries to Brazil to colonize it for Christianity. They were in competition with the Portuguese who wanted to exploit the natives for gold and slavery.

The Soldiers of God’s approach was that of the Crusades. Force was used if necessary. While the Portuguese didn’t take prisoners to get what they wanted, the warriors of Christ did in order to make converts.

Their success led to banishment by the Portuguese in the 18th century, but Catholicism remains the dominant religion in Brazil. The painting was no doubt hidden, as the Jesuits methods were something of an embarrassment in the early 1960s, the time of the Second Vatican Council and good Pope John XXIII.

Brazil at the time was a military dictatorship mainly known for football and Rio Carnaval.

I felt there must be more to the fifth largest country in the world. Adventure stories by W.H. Hudson and Ian Fleming did not prepare me for Theodore Roosevelt’s Through the Brazilian Wilderness, a travel memoir that dug deep.

I discovered that in 1914 he wrote about the same tribe Claude Levi-Strauss studied in the 1930s. The anthropologist’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) thrilled my generation with its optimism for the New World, and Brazil’s Barravento beach became a destination for hippies and Pop singers.

But it was Euclides da Cunha’s masterpiece, Rebellion in the Backlands (1899) that drew me to the interior of the North East. It is a scientific work about survival in the semi-desert sertão that segues into the true story of when the local people took on the rest of Brazil in a fight to the death.

I met my future partner, Margaret, at a showing of Gláuber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969) in St Andrews film club. Her interest in the literature of the North East led me to João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s Sergeant Getúlio (1977), and the Brazilian concept of vara (‘If a problem does not have a solution, it is not a problem’).

This philosophy intrigued me. In the 1970s I was not unknown as a poet and playwright in Ireland. But realizing I needed to do something serious to support myself, I qualified as an epidemiologist.

While continuing writing, I worked free-lance engaging in research projects that essentially saw no problem without a potential solution. In the early 1980s this was rudely challenged by Aids, and I lost heart in my work for a time.

One afternoon in the mid-80s I offered advice to Oxfam on how to deal with the Indian communities’ move from a forest diet to a sugar-based one in their refugee settlements. Rotten black teeth were the norm for children. My recommendation was to put fluoride in their drinking water.

Fluoride is a waste product of the aluminum industry. Pedrinho, a Brazilian from the University of Salvador, whom I had helped with references for his doctoral thesis, identified the location of the factories and the bus network to transport the free industrial source to the Indian settlements. Pedrinho made sure the project got off the ground, and we became friends by letter.

On the back of that I decided to take my annual holidays in Brazil in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I had two pretexts: a reported outbreak on the São Francisco river of cancrum oris, a nutritional disease that had long disappeared in the West.

And secondly an interest in the Literature of the Cordel, street ballads by folk poets and musicians that served as newspapers for the illiterate. Their broad-sheets sold in thousands and they were often used as theme songs in Brazilian soap operas.

Travel is about bringing preconceptions down to earth. Rio despite its scenic marvels took me aback by its extremes of poverty and wealth, and latent violence. In order to fulfill my medical mission, Pedrinho arranged a military plane trip to the São Francisco river. The reports of cases of cancrum oris proved false.

In order to get some measure of Brazil as a whole I flew to the Amazon, Rondônia, Brasília, Belo Horizonte, taking in the golden city of Ouro Preto. I wasn’t disappointed. But, sated by cultural tourism, I headed for the North East by bus, and immediately began to feel, if not at home, at ease with the people and myself.

I abandoned medical scouting, and concentrated on getting to know the culture of cordels. That did not prevent me from being drawn into a cholera campaign that went wildly amiss due to corruption.

I kept diaries of my experiences, and reported back to Pedrinho. My five Brazilian summers coincided with the country’s re-emergence into democracy, and it seemed on the part of the electorate that vara reigned supreme.

There was nothing to be done with the problems of poverty, shanty towns or political corruption. Lula, the workers candidate, thought otherwise. But he hadn’t a hope. I decided to talk to Ubaldo Ribeiro, whose novels exemplified vara, and yet he was an enlightened political journalist.

After spending a week with Pedrinho in his home town in the interior which hadn’t seen rain for ten years, my European moral doubts came to the boil.

Although I loved being in Brazil, particularly the back-lands, I became increasingly hot and bothered as I got to know close up the ‘compromises’ he had to make to keep his family in the middle class.

I argued with him like a Jesuit, forcibly trying to convert him to my values. He was merely perplexed. And I returned to London in confusion. It was to be my last visit.

To clear my mind I typed out my diary. And when Margaret read it, she laughed. ‘Is that what you were thinking while you were enjoying yourself? It isn’t what happened’. I published the sections about the Literature of the Cordel (Lampion and his Bandits, Menard Press, 1994, and my attempts to meet Ubaldo, Hopscotch, Duke University, 1995), and left it be. My friendship with Pedrinho was strained enough.

When Margaret died in 2012, I remember how happy she was in Brazil. The dry heat of the sertão suited her, and she learned to ride a motorbike in the jungle. I returned to my diaries and indeed what she loved was all there.

Only the latter chapters read like the diary of madman. I couldn’t help laughing at myself. And so in homage to her I rewrote it, trying to be as true as possible to my experience, worms, wonders and all.

As I could never write about her convincingly (we were too close, and that closeness came between Brazil and me), I replaced her in the narrative by the photographs she took with a box-camera. The auto-fiction Brazilian Tequila is the result.

Augustus Young was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1943. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, particularly in Brazil. As an epidemiologist he has contributed to many medical journals, national newspapers and literary periodicals. His most recent publications include Memoire (Menard/ Duras Press, 2015), Diversifications: Poems and Translations (Shearsman, 2009), and The Nicotine Cat and Other People: Chronicles of the Self (New Island/Duras, 2009).

Brazil remains the world’s most Catholic country, but over the past 20 years the Catholic Church has been losing sizable ground, especially to the evangelical faiths. Still 126 million people, or 74% of the population, consider themselves Catholics. The number of people without religion has also increased.

These data are part of the “Portrait of Religions in Brazil,” released on Wednesday, April 20, by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV). The study was based on the most recent demographic census, conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2000.

According to the director of the center of Social Policies (CPS) of the FGV’s Brazilian Economics Institute, Marcelo Neri, the Catholic portion of the country’s population declined 20% between 1940 and 2000.

According to the economist, the study reveals that, among the many socioeconomic variables, such as marriage, fertility, occupation, income, and inequality, that are covered in the most recent censuses, none has changed as much as the religious composition of the Brazilian population.

In Neri’s view, this situation may be related to the economic stagnation of recent years.

“Perhaps the Church is presently seen, on the one hand, as a form of upward social mobility, while, on the other, the new emerging churches play an essential role in terms of the social protection network. A social protection network that substitutes the State,” the economist explained.

The study also shows that over the last 30 years women are becoming less Catholic, even though they are still more religious than men. According to the “Portrait of Religions in Brazil,” the female presence outweighs the male in 43 of the 50 religions that are listed.

For Neri, the conservatism of the Catholic Church constitutes another likely factor behind the growth of other religions, chiefly the evangelical Pentecostalists.

“In the past 30 years of feminist revolution, in which women have gained ground in the labor market and the educational system, to the point of surpassing men, perhaps the Catholic religion has not provided the space women need for this reinsertion in society,” Neri affirmed.

Agência Brasil

Unfortunately, the history of Catholicism in this country has historically involved condemnation of liberal democracy as well as of entrepreneurs as ‘parasites’ enriching themselves at the expense of the poor.

Regardless of current change in terms of ideological outlook, many Catholics of this country still retain the old distrust of individual liberty.

In colonial times, the usually corrupt and lax of morals Roman Catholic clergy enthusiastically supported the domination of sugar-planters. Priests were not only their main political allies, but also strong adherents of the slavery system as well.

This adherence was not only expressed by means of theological justification for slavery (they argued that Afro-Brazilians did not have human soul), as the Church itself was directly involved in the economic exploitation of its vast properties through the institution of slavery. In fact, the Catholic Church was the largest landholder and slave-owner back to those times.

After Brazil’s independence from Portugal, in 1822, the Catholic Church would be subject to direct control of the Brazilian Imperial government. There was much flaunting of independence from Rome.

The Vatican’s desire for direct line of authority to the Brazilian church was seen, not only by the government but also by most churchmen, as unduly interference by the Holy See in the affairs of the state.

When the Republic was proclaimed, in 1889, the Catholic Church was finally separated from the state and assured with a range of religious freedoms from political interference.

Ironically, Catholic radicals are now associated with radical political movements, for this Church has now acquired in Brazil a profoundly socialistic orientation.

For the elimination of ‘evils’ and ‘social contradictions’ that they see only in capitalism, many priests are entirely convinced that the current democratic system needs to be replaced by another constitutional structure that would allow the state to intervene in every aspect of our individual, social, political, and economic lives. The ideology to guide the functioning of this structure is based on Marxism, which is naturally far removed from authentic Christianity.

In Brazil, many Catholic theologians have advocated the totally false premise that personal freedom might be achieved through revolutionary socialism. The enormous quantity of revolutionary literature on liberation theology in this country clearly indicates the growing discussion of violence and revolution as class struggle analysis involving the glorification of the poor and vilification of the rich.

Since these theologians identify religiosity with class struggle, and the ‘poor’ with ‘revolutionary proletariat’, their basic struggle is therefore for the replacement of the current democratic legal order by violent means. Many priests in Brazil like to lament poverty but are eager to promote the economically destructive idea that owning property is sinful.

Influential members of the Catholic Church in Brazil have recently lobbied at the Vatican for the “important work that the base communities inspired by liberation theology are carrying out in the country”.

When the Pope John Paul II called friar Leornado Boff to explain his quite bizarre concept of an “ecclesiastical division of labour” in which the hierarchy of the church would engage itself in “the expropriation of the means of religious production from the Christian people”, two Brazilian cardinals supported him during the interrogation.

In 1987, the same Boff declared that communist regimes like the Soviet Union offered “the objective possibility of living more easily in the spirit of the Gospels and of observing the Commandments”.

Although the penetration of Marxist ideas in the Catholic Church might be justified on account of socio-economic exploitation, such Catholic priests are utterly blind to postulate the exchange of one kind of exploitation for another that is one thousand times worse.

According to Stephane Courtois, the editor of a fundamental book called Le Livre Noir du Communisme (“The Black Book of Communism”), at least 100 million people were killed by Marxist regimes only in the last century.

Therefore, disciples of Marx like Brazilian Catholic priests have been far more efficient at the ‘art’ of killing innocent people than at promoting any form of social justice.

From the standpoint of Realpolitik it is not a mistake to affirm that the class genocide promoted by Marxist regimes may be easily compared to Nazism’s race genocide.

And probably for this and several other reasons Adolf Hitler once declared at a famous speech in Munich that “basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same”.

Recently, the Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CNBB) published a document which declares the Marxist-oriented liberation theology as not only timely but also “useful and consistent with the Gospel”.

If so, we might suggest that such ‘gospel’ is called ‘Das Kapital’ and has been written according to Karl Marx. For the role played by these Catholic priests and theologians very much resembles that of Father Gapon at the beginning of the Soviet Revolution.

In a few words, what these priests are doing is to gradually turn the religiosity of ignorant people away from real Christianity, as a Marxist strategy for the ultimate destruction in this country not only of the Catholic faith but also of democracy and the rule of law.

In a society which is overwhelming Catholic, both in culture and ‘spirit’, such infiltration in the Church constitutes a much serious menace for the already uncertain future of democracy in Brazil.

Augusto Zimmermann is a Brazilian Law Professor and PhD candidate for Monash University – Faculty of Law, in Australia. The topic of his research is the (un)rule of law and legal culture in Brazil. He holds a LL.B and a LL.M (Hons.) from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and is a former Law Professor at the NPPG (Research and Post-graduation Law Department) of Bennett Methodist University, and Estácio de Sá University, in Rio de Janeiro. His email address is: augustozimmermann@hotmail.com.