The election of Jair Bolsonaro is arguably an even
greater disaster than the election of Donald Trump.
This is a man who actively celebrates fascism,
who wants to take Brazil back 50 years
into its very darkest days when trade 
unionists were disappeared off the street,
when thousands of people were tortured.
A man who wants to destroy the biggest terrestrial
ecosystem on earth: the Amazon rainforest.
This is a moment of great threat, a terrifying
moment, but how did it come about?
During Brazil's military dictatorship
from the mid 60's to the mid 80s
resistance really accreted around Liberation Theology.
Theologians who said that the church's
mission was to the poor and rather than
just promising them a better afterlife
ensure they have a better life on this earth.
What they did in Brazil was to
create hope. They created a focus for
opposition to the military dictatorship,
to the land grabbers, to the oligarchs,
who were basically carving up the whole
country, excluding the great majority of its people,
and a way in which people could build
politically and create a way out of poverty.
One of the famous liberationists in Brazil was
Dom hélder Câmara, who is famous for saying
"when I help the poor they call me a saint, when I ask
why they are poor they call me a communist."
This was really key to the end of the dictatorship
and to the democratisation of Brazilian society,
but it was absolutely hated by some members of the
church hierarchy and particularly by John Paul II
and his kind of enforcer Cardinal Ratzinger who later became Pope Benedict
and they stamped it out, they
imposed silences on priests.
It culminated in silencing the primary exponent
of Liberation Theology in Brazil Leonardo Boff,
In order to prevent him from speaking 
at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
Millions of people suddenly had no hope.
they were suddenly deprived of
the centres of organisation which had allowed them
to create these incredibly powerful movements.
The result of this was that the movement collapsed
and that collapse created an opening
for a different kind of theology: 
evangelical Protestantism.
The evangelical churches, many of them 
based in the US, moved into Brazil in droves
and began preaching something completely different:
"the meek shall inherit the earth," so be meek.
It's ungodly to fight the system just survive as best you
can and you will inherit your reward in the next life.
Oh, and let's speed things up a bit,
because when the apocalypse comes
the righteous will be lifted up and
will sit at God's right hand
while the unrighteous are cast into the fiery pit
and there will be a great global vindication.
and this apocalyptic strand in evangelical
 thought is far more important
and dangerous than many people recognise.
It's been a big deal in the United States
where people go on evangelical tours to
Israel to look at the site of Armageddon;
see where it's all going to happen and see how they can
accelerate the process towards the apocalypse.
In common with Donald Trump, Bolsonaro wants to
move the Brazilian Embassy to Jerusalem.
This is highly symbolic because for a start,
it's basically saying we accept
the occupation of the occupied territories,
Israel you can do what you like,
but it also does tie in very strongly with this evangelical interest in Apocalypse.
Well, there's a very similar line of thinking in Brazil
and one way of accelerating the process:
you cut down all the rainforests
accelerate climate disaster, you
push people towards desperation
and Bolsonaro is their candidate.
He was pushed very hard by
the pentecostalist churches.
A big part of the reason for his success
is that religious following.
So if you trace it back far enough you can
see this really as a failure on the part of
the Catholic Church to build on this transformative
movement to create structural change.
The fact that that movement was killed
has led indirectly, over many years, to the
 rise of the most dangerous man on earth.
There was a time when the political left in Brazil was
the leading global example of grassroots politics,
of how to do it, unfortunately as often happens
the leadership became more and
more detached from that grassroots and
less and less accountable to it and when
it did so it became vulnerable.
There were corruption scandals and there
was ultimately a kind of constitutional coup
against the leadership of Dilma
Rousseff ensuring that the right could then take over,
opening the way for Bolsonaro.
Brazil is an extraordinary country
it's where I learnt my politics.
I learnt it from mostly illiterate people fighting all the
powers of the land and I watched them win
through a grassroots mobilisation which
I saw as the model the worldwide politics.
They still know how to do that, despite the
very dark days that Brazil is plunged into.
What happens in Brazil is everybody's business
not least because if those rainforests are
destroyed by Bolsonaro we are screwed
and those rainforests store a
phenomenal amount of carbon.
If they are cut down and burnt that carbon goes
into the atmosphere it will massively accelerate
climate breakdown. We're also of course
destroy the homes and lives of the
millions of people who live across the Amazon
as well as opening up the whole region
to shocking forms of exploitation and slavery,
some of which I witnessed when I lived there.
but will become much worse under Bolsonaro.
This is the Brazilians business
but it's also our business
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