Photo Essay: How the Right-Wing Attack in Brazil Looked on the Ground

“The Prison Within” (2021) is a provocative and intriguing documentary produced by Katherin Hervey, a former public defender and prison instructor. Provocative, because we are presented with adult male inmates in San Quentin Prison in northern California struggling with unidentified and untreated multi-generational trauma. Intriguing because the documentary presents a compelling argument for restorative justice, yet it stops short of sparking a larger conversation about what to do about prisons in a truly civilized society.

The documentary focuses on the Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG) program conducted by the Insight Prison Project (IPP) at San Quentin Prison. The IPP describes the VOEG program on their website as

“…an intensive 18-month group program for incarcerated people who wish to understand themselves better, how their life experiences and decisions led them to prison and how their crimes have impacted their victim(s). The purpose of the training is to help incarcerated people understand and take responsibility for the impact of the crime(s) they have committed. The class culminates with participants meeting with victims for a healing dialogue.”

Though this is not highlighted in the documentary quite as clearly as the purpose of the program, it does give some insight into why the documentary deals with restorative justice within the prison system, as opposed to a society-wide imperative.

The documentary provides quite an extensive discussion into how unaddressed and unresolved trauma helps affect the way victims see the world around them, and how they see and feel about themselves and others. It presents this idea largely through the stories of several men who are in the VOEG program, as they recount the paths that led them to prison.

We are presented with the real-life cause-and-effects of neglect, abuse and generational trauma, and how they all can turn inward into self-doubt, self-hate and fear, eventually compelling anti-social behavior that inflicts trauma onto others. Unresolved anger at the person or persons who inflicted the trauma was a common theme.

A promising discussion was raised by one man about how he served time in the military, which led him to more violence. But this time, it was state-sanctioned violence. However, the discussion did not expand into how the military reinforces violence as a solution to problems, while also exposing millions of traumatized people to more violence, which produces even more trauma in the form of disorders such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). That is then not treated by the very military that trains people to commit barbarous acts against other human beings. This documentary on justice feels like a lost opportunity to connect militarism with the devaluation of human life and U.S. imperialism.

However, one imprisoned man seems to conflate the systemic racism with the inward and outward expressions of unresolved trauma that his father and even he experienced because of racism. I think that is where the documentary misplaces forgiveness as a response to systemic racism. Racism is based on irrational, illogical fears and emotions based on stereotypes, lies, and propaganda against a group of people that is used to deny them human rights. Trauma is the result of real and tangible abuses, emotions, and fears. Yes, trauma can result because of racism, but can it be said that racism happens because racists are traumatized, as it seems the documentary is attempting to suggest? I think this is the danger in relating to racism, and especially racist violence, as another expression of unresolved trauma.

The documentary presents a difficult-to-sit-with conversation about the ways race and ethnicity shield some people from scrutiny and prosecution while they commit crimes, while others face the brunt of the state. This discussion is difficult because it shows how messy it is to try to put people into “good/bad” categories. Is someone who is the victim of sexual abuse and other traumas a “bad” person if they act violently toward others? If we believe that “hurt people hurt people,” why do we not believe this for people in prison, who are mostly poor and predominantly people of color? And if we do not, why do we condemn and throw away one, but not the other? For many people, confronting these questions can be difficult, and the documentary does a good job of helping viewers think about class and race biases in these matters.

Another very important issue raised in the documentary is fathers not expressing love and acceptance with their boys. The lack of affection and protection from their fathers—even if they were present—while receiving hostility or outright abuse is a recurring theme in many of the stories imprisoned men told. Society so easily falls back on the trope that so many men—especially Black men—turn to crime because they had no fathers or father figures in their early lives. Yet, we hear from these men that emotionally distant or abusive fathers—who often acted that way because they were acting out the trauma they experienced in their youth—that exposed these imprisoned men to their first and lasting traumas.

Yet another issue discussed is male children who are artistic or creative not being accepted because they are not expressing their “maleness” in traditional ways or in ways that are acceptable to the older men in the family. This drives them to seek acceptance by acting in destructive and risky ways that may also be outside of their nature. Further, the documentary explores how rejection teaches young boys to suppress their natural, normal emotions, and conditions them to view others who express those emotions as weak, too.

A very interesting twist on the “hurt people hurt people” idea is presented when the widow of a murdered cop comes to terms with her role in advocating for the death sentence for her husband’s murderer. This aspect of the documentary provides insight into one person’s journey toward peace, but should it be an instructive for how millions in this society view the death penalty as a just form of punishment? Are they all “hurt people” who support the death penalty and even may relish in it in some regards out of unresolved pain and trauma? The documentary does touch on how people in the United States are convinced—basically indoctrinated—to believe the death penalty is not only reasonable, but necessary. Perhaps focusing on an individual journey of healing as a reflection of or as a potential remedy for systemic human-rights violations via the death penalty is a deeply flawed and potentially dangerous premise. Especially considering the work the widow in question is revealed as pursuing or, more precisely, who she serves in her work, as we learn at the documentary’s end.

The film lays out in clear, concise and emotionally compelling ways both the cycle of unaddressed and untreated trauma that leads people to prison—an environment that thrives off and perpetuates more trauma—is unaddressed in prison, and that communities have no tools to address the issue with released prisoners.

But an opportunity to discuss prison’s utility in the just and supportive society we claim to be fighting for—as well as with what to replace prisons—is not present in this documentary.

Surely, abolition cannot be achieved without an agreed-upon alternative to prisons. But if the goal is to not just reform prisons to make them “better,” but to create a society in which prisons are obsolete, the following must be discussed: 1) Methods of accountability and restoration for individuals who commit acts that break the social contract and 2) the state’s responsibility in its part of the social contract to ensure every person’s human rights are respected in the provision of housing, education, jobs that pay a living wage, comprehensive healthcare, etc., so traumas are not systematically inflicted on people as an inherent aspect of the system, but also so individual traumas are addressed as an inherent aspect of the system.

Prison reform is certainly needed to immediately stop the cycle of trauma the prison-industrial complex and the penchant for retribution indoctrinated into the American psyche creates. But any effort at prison reform that doesn’t involve dismantling capitalism, white supremacy and classism will only uphold the system. Although “The Prison Within” makes a few fleeting mentions of expanding treatment and mitigation programs to keep traumatized people from going to prison in the first place, restorative justice is presented inside the narrow construct of reforming prisons to make them “better.” That all makes sense when the discussion is not intended to be about replacing prisons with humane and truly restorative systems.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary.”

SÃO PAOLO, Brazil—Brazilians head to the polls October 2 to vote in the first round of what is considered the most consequential presidential election since the end of almost 20 years of U.S.-backed military dictatorships.

“The fundamental choice,” stated an open letter by several Latin American figures, including ousted Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, “isn’t between [the two presidential hopefuls, President] Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, but between fascism and democracy.”

With Brazil being the fifth-largest country by area, along with having the seventh-largest population and economy, the outcome of this election could not only significantly alter the lives of Brazilians, but impact regional politics that have recently swung left as well as the health of the planet.

And it’s not just the outcome that matters.

“Bolsonaro [trailing in the polls] has questioned democracy and camouflaged himself as the great victim of the lack of democracy,” said Danny Shaw, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Professor at the City University of New York, explained to Toward Freedom. “He has preemptively attacked the integrity of the entire voting process.”

Bolsonaro has repeatedly said he would only accept election results if they were “clean,” but that he doubted they would be. Through livestreams, he has spoken to followers about resisting a loss and helping stage a coup. A poll showed high support for a coup among members of the Brazilian Navy and the Air Force, while enthusiasm remained low in the larger army. “But, it doesn’t seem like he has institutional support from within the military to make these things into a reality,” according to Shaw.

“It’s kind of unimaginable,” said Socialist and Liberty Party (PSOL) São Paulo state deputy candidate Ediane Maria, “to see Bolsonaro passing the [presidential] sash to Lula.”

This reporter reached out to Lula’s Workers’ Party and Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party for comment, but they did not reply by publication time.

Brazil’s recent history includes a 2016 procedural coup against Rousseff in favor of her business-friendly vice president, Michel Temer. Lula himself was incarcerated in 2018, which a court has since found to have been unlawful, as well as a separate ruling that banned him from competing in the 2018 election that Bolsonaro won.

In this period, Brazil ranked as one of the 10 largest democratic backslides, according to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Testing Democracy

If the necessary conditions for fascism are nativism, belief in a social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation, and anti-democratism, Shaw said Bolsonaro meets the criteria of a fascist. Bolsonaro’s government has the “underpinnings and trappings of fascist rule,” Shaw explained. “The unofficial religion of Bolsonarismo is anti-socialism and anti-communism.”

Bolsonaro pressured the electoral commission to allow the military to also count votes, and that has succeeded, according to newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

The PSOL and Folha de São Paulo assert Bolsonaro created a parallel $1 billion budget to buy support in Congress to prevent an impeachment and to fund his campaign.

Bolsonaro has glorified Brazil’s brutal military dictatorships and has conveyed himself to be like Benito Mussolini, including with black-clad motorcycle rallies.

He demanded leftists be “eradicated from public life” hours after a Bolsonaro-supporting farmer murdered his Lula-favoring colleague with an ax. He also called for Workers’ Party supporters to be “machine-gunned.”

This month, an assailant reportedly announced “I am Bolsonaro” while pointing a gun at Maria and her fellow PSOL candidate for the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, Guilherme Boulos.

“It was an attack on our democracy, on our freedom of expression,” Maria told Toward Freedom. “You see horror scenes of people who are killed at work, or in the streets just for defending what they believe in. This year, people sense the violence, the fights. We have a president who says, ‘shoot them in the head,’ that encourages and defends mass gun ownership. Thank God it’s coming to an end… this moment of horror that we lived through, this process of violence against our bodies.”

Filipe Campante, professor at Johns Hopkins University, raised it is unclear whose responsibility it would be to evict Bolsonaro from the presidential palace if he opted to stay. No one is certain how such a scenario would play out, and in the disorder, the perceived legitimacy of the handover of power could be damaged. Even if Bolsonaro does give way to Lula, Campante and others have raised important questions about the strength and preparedness of Brazil’s democratic institutions. All key parties have met regularly with the military, which has played its cards close to its chest. As Campante said, this culture of keeping the military close is a sign of a “democracy that’s not healthy.”

A poll last week found 40 percent of Brazilians expect a high chance of violence on Election Day, and 9 percent might avoid voting (at risk of penalties) because of fear.

“If Brazilian [progressives] can [win] given the political climate they’re facing,” explained U.S.-based human-rights and labor-rights lawyer Dan Kovalik to Toward Freedom, “then everyone should be able to do it.” He added it would be an inspiring victory for movements as far away as Europe.

The Global Implications of a Lula Victory

So far, the Brazilian left has been relatively united in helping Lula win. Maria’s left-wing PSOL, for instance, hasn’t presented a presidential candidate. The Latin American leaders’ letter mentioned earlier was addressed to Ciro Gomes, a centrist candidate polling around 7 percent. The letter asked him to pull out to avoid a Bolsonaro win.

“The Pink Tide seems to be back,” Kovalik said about the recent wave of progressive victories across Latin America. “But I think Brazil needs to be a part of that because other countries—Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua—are under great attack, especially economically, by the United States. To have Brazil’s support again would be huge, both their political and economic support. It’d definitely leaven the movement.”

A red Brazil is likely to not rely on special relationships with strongmen, as Bolsonaro did with former Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, former U.S. President Donald Trump and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A Lula victory, added Kovalik, “would help bring about the multipolar world that we need.”

However, as foreign policy did not form a large part of the electoral campaign, and the global dynamics are different compared to when Lula was last in power in 2010, it is difficult to predict the exact foreign implications of a Lula victory. Lula invited Palestine to the 2010 BRICS summit in Brasilia, Brazil’s capital. (BRICS is an acronym that stands for an alliance between the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.) But he also sent Brazilian troops for UN peacekeeping in Haiti, where they abused their power and stayed for years after being asked to leave.

“I think we can expect a more anti-imperialist Lula,” Shaw posited. “Even a neutral Lula would neutralize imperialism” by building a stronger relationship with Caracas and other anti-imperialist governments.

Challenges a Third Lula Term Would Face

However, a commodities boom had buoyed the original Pink Tide that had started in the 1990s and ended in the 2000s. Moreover, Bolsonaro, as Kovalik has said, has “dismantled social programs.” This raises questions about the surmountability of the challenges faced by a new government.

Lula’s last government “broke the cycles,” as Maria put it, “to break barriers, to put the bricklayer’s son and the housecleaner’s daughter into university.”

But Bruno Clima, an architect in the housing-justice group Central Homeless Movement (MSTC) in São Paulo, is worried about current challenges. “Even with the victory of a capable president, lifting the country up will not be easy or quick.”

With limited resources and enormous crises, Lula might struggle to meet such expectations in one term. Some are worried enough Brazilians would lose patience with him after that, and this turn to progressivism could be a bump in a larger turn towards neoliberalism.

For now, Maria sees the upcoming election as a battle between democracy and fascism.

“Our country is hoping that love can win over hate and that we are going to elect Lula in the first round, and elect him well,” Maria said. “We will fight for democracy in Brazil, which has never in my lifetime been as threatened as it is now.”

Richard Matoušek is a journalist who covers sociopolitical issues in southern Europe and Latin America. He can be followed on Twitter at @RichMatousek and on Instagram at @richmatico.

SÃO PAOLO, Brazil—What began as loud cheers mellowed out as election results were announced outside the CNN Brasil headquarters on October 2. Laughs merged into murmurs as onlookers began to hug each other.

It had become clear to the crowd of hundreds of “petistas,” or Workers’ Party (PT) supporters, that PT presidential candidate Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva—whom the Brazilian left had rallied behind—would have to fight a second round on October 30 against incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro.

Two middle-aged female petistas mourned when their state—Rio—elected a Bolsonarista governor.

“The poor don’t know how to vote,” one snapped in response to her friend, who had her face in her hands.

Some Brazilians’ desire to climb class rungs has helped win votes for Bolsonaro and his Liberal Party (PL) colleagues at the local and legislative levels of government. This, despite an appetite for progressive politics after four years of what City University of New York professor Danny Shaw described to Toward Freedom as the “underpinnings and trappings of fascist rule” as well as hundreds of thousands of avoidable COVID-19 deaths.

Lula’s Strategy ‘Has Not Paid Off’

Bolsonaro had garnered more votes than polls had predicted. During this year, neither of the leading pollsters—Datafolha and IPEC—showed Bolsonaro polling above 34 percent or 31 percent, respectively. In the end, Bolsonaro received 43.2 percent of votes and Lula 48.4 percent.

London School of Economics urban geographer Matthew Aaron Richmond said Bolsonaro’s base has remained relatively diverse as well, at least in income. In Rio, for instance, Bolsonaro has retained his strength in the low-income peripheries, where churches and militias with links to the police have a fair amount of authority. The same retention is true for the moderate-income settlements around Brazil’s most-populated southeast region, like Santo André in São Paulo.

“This suggests that Lula’s strategy of winning over such voters with a moderate pitch and coalition building has not paid off as hoped,” Richmond tweeted.

The Brazilian Right’s Advantage

Although many have posited Brazil-specific reasons for Bolsonaro’s continued popularity, one bloc has been encouraging—even coercing—others to vote for Bolsonaro because it would benefit from the inequitable policies he prioritizes, such as privatizing state firms like Petrobras, and supporting agribusiness in a way that has harmed the environment.

Journalist and historian Benjamin Fogel said the election has revealed Bolsonarismo as a “solidified electoral bloc with a clear ideological vision—to dismantle what remains of Brazil’s diminishing state capacity by handing over the country to the police mafias, evangelical capos, big agro and all sorts of other dodgy private interests.”

This bloc began to show its might well before Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign, with the procedural coup against former President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the unlawful incarceration of Lula in 2018.

These kicked off the phenomenon of “antipetismo,” a campaign attacking the PT that has damaged government institutions and redistributive politics.

Revelations during this year’s campaign have shown Bolsonaro and his family have engaged in corrupt activities, including secretly siphoning off billions of Brazilian reals in health funding to pay off congresspeople to stop him being impeached.

Despite this, and the overturning of Lula’s imprisonment, many Bolsonaristas genuinely believe Lula and the PT are more corrupt than Bolsonaro.

The interest of many sectors of capital in keeping Bolsonaro in Brasilia has also meant many employers have illegally encouraged or asked their employees to vote for him. This is especially true in agrobusiness. Stara, an agricultural equipment company, sent staff letters this week predicting layoffs under a Lula government. As lawyer Rômulo Cavalcante told Toward Freedom, this is illegal.

The Class Effect

Bolsonaro’s links to big capital and Lula’s track record of strong redistribution as well as his base among the poor have impacted voting patterns. Some Brazilians who see themselves as middle class or hope to climb into that class voted for Bolsonaro. Not all of these people fit theorist Karl Marx’s definition of middle class because they don’t accrue wealth through others’ labor. That doesn’t change the fact, as author Hadas Thier alludes to, that they culturally identify as such.

Bolsonaro—often called “Trump of the Tropics”—is a favorite among Brazilian college graduates, according to a widely reported Datafolha poll.

This reporter’s friend said when his mother—a lawyer—asked him how he would vote and he replied ‘Lula,’ she retorted: ‘How could you? You have a degree!’

Voting out the PT is being viewed as a condition of being part of a better-off class, which partly explains Bolsonarismo’s endurance in places like Santo André in São Paolo.

The Strength of the Brazilian Left

Analysis has also shown that vote-buying has occurred, and many of the congress people who Bolsonaro has paid off have then themselves bought votes through clientelism and corruption.

That said, this election has also demonstrated strong Brazilian support for the left.

Brazil’s northeast has again come out strongly for the PT. Rosa Amorim was elected to the state of Pernambuco’s legislature, making her the first deputy to have grown up on one of many settlements of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MTST), a housing-justice organization.

Further south in São Paulo, Guilherme Boulos, an MTST leader, received over a million votes as a Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) candidate for the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.

Other PSOL candidates pulled through on Election Day, too. Sônia Guajajara is the first Indigenous person and Ediane Maria is the first domestic worker elected to São Paulo’s chamber. Erika Hilton, meanwhile, became the first transgender member of Brazil’s legislature.

Brazilians still support these movements that make Brazil a particularly fertile ground for progressive activism.

Capital’s Interests Beyond Bolsonaro

However, Brazil doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it is not immune to the forces that affect any capitalist country.

As Shaw explained to Toward Freedom, “Six to 10 families control [Brazil’s] entire media apparatus.”

Some have suggested big capital’s interest goes beyond Bolsonaro. A third candidate, Simone Tebet of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), received a disproportionate amount of airtime, suggested right-wing business advocate Brian Winter. Before the campaign, said Cavalcante, “she wasn’t known outside her state.” As journalist Brian Mier has suggested, a sector of capital wanted a viable candidate who wasn’t as incompetent as Bolsonaro, as redistributive as Lula, or as boring as candidate Ciro Gomes of the Democratic Labor Party.

After being knocked out on Sunday, Tebet endorsed Lula, who remains the favorite.

Back in front of the CNN Brasil headquarters on election night, Lula made an appearance after the crowd digested the result.

“It’s like destiny likes me having to work a bit more,” Lula said to a crowd that appeared to have grown to the low thousands because he showed up. “The campaign starts tomorrow… We are going to win these elections!”

As Maria told Toward Freedom, the left’s “abundant energy” will be up against a “giant force.” On October 30, we’ll find out which of the two will succeed.

Richard Matoušek is a journalist who covers sociopolitical issues in southern Europe and Latin America. He can be followed on Twitter at @RichMatousek and on Instagram at @richmatico.