MÍDIA

Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos | Spectre Journal

This piece is the first installment in a two-part series by Brazilian economic historian, Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos. Read together as a single essay, these pieces consider the prospects for Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro being forced from office. This is, Zahluth Bastos argues, a product of emergent antagonisms in Bolsonaro’s ruling coalition. The first of these is the subject of today’s article: the question of corruption. More specifically, he examines how the anti-corruption drive spearheaded by the Law and Order bureaucracies, which were in turn empowered during the Operation Carwash investigations, began to unravel under the weight of its own contradictions. In a follow-up piece, to be published very shortly, he examines a second antagonism: internal debates over the regime’s radical neoliberal agenda, and how this has been the source of internal rifts in the time of the pandemic and its attendant economic depression.

Full article.