During the first days of The Brazilian Report’s existence, reporter Ciara Long pointed out how the arguments of Brazil’s gun rights activists were a copied-and-pasted version of the U.S. National Rifle Association’s playbook. “It’s not just an imported logic, but even the posts, the memes,” Ivan Marques, director of NGO Instituto Sou da Paz, said at the time. But if you pay more attention to it, you will see that this phenomenon is not exclusive to the pro-gun movement. Brazil’s left and right are increasingly importing American culture wars — transplanting discussions without much adaptation to a totally different context.
Just last week, President Jair Bolsonaro tried to spark an anti-vaxxer movement, saying “no-one can force anyone to take a Covid-19 vaccine.” The argument that strict vaccination policies are a violation of people’s personal liberties seems to come straight from the U.S. anti-vaccine discussion. It is, as well, completely out of touch with the Brazilian reality — where 88 percent of citizens would take a coronavirus vaccine as soon as it becomes available, according to a recent Ipsos-Mori poll.
Anti-vaxxers in the U.S. have become associated with supporters of President Donald Trump, and vaccination policies have become one of the uncountable battlegrounds for culture wars. While Brazil has its own complicated history of resistance to vaccination evidenced in the famous 1904 vaccine revolt in Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Bolsonaro’s words are more evidence of this major ongoing cultural shift in Brazil.
The shameless adoption of U.S. culture wars has become a calling card for the Jair Bolsonaro brand. A few weeks ago, his third-eldest son, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, posted a picture of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old shooter who gunned down Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin. Mr. Bolsonaro said the shooter was defending his property from “terrorists,” and offered his “total support for young Kyle.”
The youngest Bolsonaro politician son is known for his unchecked love of all things alt-right and Trump (he frequently wears MAGA hats). One time, he praised fast-food chain Popeye’s Chicken (where he briefly worked) — which has gotten many accusations of labor rights violations — for stimulating work ethic in him, a value compromised, in his words, by Brazil’s culture of “samba, caipirinha, and carnival.”
However, the unfiltered import of U.S. culture wars is not exclusive to the Brazilian right. In recent years, many on the left have too become active participants in U.S. culture wars.
A history of U.S. cultural influence in Brazil
Brazil and the U.S. go way back, with the Americans being the first nation to recognize the Brazilian independence. And as foreign policy professor Carlos Gustavo Poggio told the Explaining Brazil Podcast, relations between the Americas’ two largest nations have been traditionally tepid — never too close, but never too distant.
Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. has frequently sought to interfere with Brazil’s internal politics, playing an important role in funding and supporting the 1964 military coup that toppled the left-leaning João Goulart — perceived as hostile to U.S. interests.
In the post-war world, as Brazilian elites and intellectuals shifted from a francophile sentiment toward a more U.S.-centric perspective, cultural influence from North America is everywhere to be found, from Disney’s Three Caballeros and its iconic malandro parrot Zé Carioca, to Tupac’s influence on São Paulo’s rap scene.
That cultural influence started to intensify already in the 1930s, as both the U.S. and Brazilian governments sought to promote cultural exchanges between both...
Search
