ABSTRACT
On 1st January 2019 the successful far-right candidate in the Brazilian presidential elections, Jair Bolsonaro, was sworn into the presidency. 1 The impact of this dramatic political shift, from 2003 and the victory of the Workers Party (PT), to the seeming collapse of the PT project (impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, imprisonment of Lula, electoral rejection of the PT presidential candidate Fernando Haddad), is a state of fear and uncertainty on the part of those who arguably benefitted from successive PT governments, given that, like Michel Temer before him, Bolsonaro seems intent on erasing all evidence of inclusion, diversity and creativity initiatives associated with the PT. A number of chapters in this volume have referenced Bolsonaro’s prejudices in relation to women, LGBTQ, Afro-Brazilians and indigenous peoples, expressed both during his campaign and while a congressman. The make-up of his initial cabinet, then, will have come as little surprise. It includes Damares Alves, head of the newly formed Ministry of Human Rights, Family and Women. Alves, an evangelical church minister who claims to have seen a vision of God in a guava tree, and who is under investigation for allegedly illegally removing her adoptive daughter from an indigenous reservation, provoked considerable reaction in the news and on social media by declaring at the time of her appointment that from now on young men would once again be princes, women would be princesses, boys will wear blue and girls will wear pink. Her words were clearly designed to undermine feminist and LGBTQ causes and echo Bolsonaro’s relentless attack on so-called gender ideology during his presidential campaign (and political career as a whole). While Bolsonaro dismissed the importance of Alves and her Ministry (Lara 2019), he did make another very controversial appointment to the key post of Chanceler (Foreign Minister): the career diplomat Ernesto Araújo. For the US-based left-wing Jacobin magazine Araújo is “the worst diplomat in the world” (Pagliarini 2019) and even the centre-right Brazilian broadsheet O estado de Sao Paulo (2019) described him as having “weird personal beliefs” and as delivering an inaugural 196speech which was “deranged”. This speech included references to global warming and “globalism” as a Marxist conspiracy. Araújo was recommended to Bolsonaro by Olavo de Carvalho, the “philosopher” of the Bolsonaro government (see Chapter 1), whose own extensive conspiracy theories include the belief that Pepsi uses the cells of unborn foetuses to sweeten soft drinks.
