The far-right poses a serious threat to Brazilian democracy, as was the case of the direct attack on federal buildings on January 8, 2023, the infamous Brasília riots.
On that day, hordes of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed and ransacked government buildings in Brasília, in the vain hope of creating the conditions for a military coup that would remove President Lula from power and bring Bolsonaro back.
Understanding the far-right is paramount to understanding Brazil’s overall political landscape. A new report maps and details the activities and ideologies of more than 20 far-right extremist groups operating in Brazil.
This week, we’re talking about who Brazil’s radicals are — and what they want.
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In this episode:
- Heidi Beirich is a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She is an expert on various forms of extremism, including the white supremacist, nativist and neo-Confederate movements, as well as racism in academia.
Background reading on the Brazilian far-right:
- Brazil’s far-right opposition seeks a global stage to counter investigations into former President Jair Bolsonaro and deepen ties with foreign counterparts, reporter Cedê Silva showed on The Brazilian Report.
- The U.S. far-right worked hard to get Jair Bolsonaro re-elected. We and Agência Pública, a partnering organization, explained how.
- After Donald Trump’s defeat and failed attempts to create a global far-right movement, institutional tensions in Brazil have made the country a crucial theater for U.S. alt-right values.
- Deputy editor Euan Marshall wrote a profile of the Brazilian Integralist Movement, a seminal organization for fascism in the country.
- Read what the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism wrote about Brazil.
- After entering World War II on the side of the Allies, the Brazilian government opened a series of concentration camps housing German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants. These stories have largely been forgotten.
Do you have a suggestion for our next Explaining Brazil podcast? Drop us a line at [email protected]
Don’t forget to follow us on X and Facebook.
Transcript of this episode (with Cockatoo)
Euan Marshall: The far right poses a serious threat to Brazilian democracy, as was the case of the direct attack on federal buildings on January 8th, 2023, the infamous Brasilia riots. On that day, hordes of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed and ransacked government buildings in Brasilia in the vain hope of creating the conditions for a military coup that would remove president Lula from power and bring Bolsonaro back.
Understanding the far right is paramount to understanding Brazil’s overall political landscape. A new report maps and details the activities and ideologies of more than 20 far-right extremist groups operating in Brazil. This week we’re talking about who Brazil’s radicals are and what they want.
My name is Euan Marshall, Deputy Editor of the Brazilian Report, and this is Explaining Brazil.
A new report by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has mapped a striking number of Brazilian groups that fuse various extremist ideologies, predominantly showing a mix of neo-nazi beliefs, far-right nationalism, and anti-LGBTQ plus sentiments. We’re here today with Dr. Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the project, to discuss its key findings. Dr. Beirich, thank you so much for joining us today.
Heidi Beirich: Oh, it’s such a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Euan Marshall: Now, before we look at how far-right groups operate in Brazil, can we talk a little bit about the history of these radical movements in the country? When did fascism come to Brazil and how strong was it when it arrived?
Heidi Beirich: Fascism came to Brazil at the same time that fascism was on the rise in Italy and in Europe, in the years before World War II, the 1920s and the 1930s. And Italian fascism in particular was influential in Brazil because the founder of Brazilian integralism, Plinio Saldado, was a big fan of Mussolini in Italy. And he based the integralist movement, which is really an indigenous Brazilian creation, but he based that on Italian fascism.
Brazil, of course, had large Italian immigrant populations at that time that were connected to this, and even had a Nazi party, a German Nazi party that took root among German emigres living But the integralism is different than Italian fascism. It was more religious in Salgado’s vision. It was not as racist or anti-Semitic as the versions that we saw in Nazi Germany and in Italy.
You know, this is partly based on the fact that Brazil had a more diverse population, including a large black population and others, that made Plinio Salgado think about things a little bit differently when it came to race. Now, this isn’t to say that Salgado was, you know, completely lacking in any kind of white supremacy.
He certainly didn’t view black folks as being necessarily completely the same as other populations, but he did include them. Now, one of his lieutenants, Gustavo Barroso, who is still praised by many modern Brazilian integralist groups or neo-integralist groups, was a rabid anti-Semite. So there was some difference among the leaders of integralism in the 20s and the 1930s in terms of the treatment of the Jewish population.
And then the other thing about it, integralism, is it was much more religious than what was found in Italy, probably because of the influence of the Catholic Church in Brazil. You would think Italy would be the same, but it wasn’t. And so you have this concept of God, country, and homeland, right? This phrase that Jair Bolsonaro would pick up later as the motto of the Integralist movement. Now, there were some things that were a lot like Italian fascism. Members of the movement dressed in uniforms. They were called green shirts. They had a symbol, the sigma, right, which is sum in a Greek letter standing for some, that was what they deployed. They did a Roman salute that was a little bit like a Nazi salute
and used a phrase that I’m sure I’m going to mispronounce, Anoe, maybe, I might have it a little wrong, which is a Tupi language word that means sort of my brother. So they had, these were elements that were clearly Brazilian, but this militarized aspect, that also was a little like the Nazi brown shirts and some of Mussolini’s cadre back in Italy.
Euan Marshall: Society wasn’t as cohesive as it is today of course, but did the integralists and the Brazilian Nazis coordinate their efforts in any way?
Heidi Beirich: Well I would say, you know, that the Nazi party outside of Germany, it was still relatively small, just a few thousand people. And that was largely because the Germans had a rule that you couldn’t be a member of the Nazi party if you didn’t have German citizenship. So Brazilian Germans who weren’t, you know, holding a German passport, essentially, because they were now, you know, Brazilian, were not involved in that movement.
So it matters that there was a Nazi party like this in Brazil, but not as big of a deal. Now, Integralism and Italian Fascism were very, very tight. So there were a lot of little organizations that popped up in Italian communities at that time, some of which would work hand in hand with Italian Fascists, others with Integralists, and the Italian consul, his name is escaping me now, to Brazil in that era was a key player with integralism.
In other words, worked together with integralists in Brazil to put them in touch with Italians. And Plinio Salgado met Mussolini in person on a trip to Italy. So there was this direct connection between them. But I would argue that integralism became very much its own Brazilian phenomenon.
It was rooted in Brazilian ideas and Brazilian history and that’s the fascist movement that matters most when you think about Brazil today. You know, I think once Plinio Salgado created his, I hate to even try to pronounce it, AIB political party, because I know I’ll butcher the Brazilian Portuguese.
AIB had several hundred thousand members. So it was a big force, the biggest political force and the biggest political party that Brazil had ever seen in its history. And so that I think is more important when we’re talking about nowadays, the connection between integralism back in the 20s and the 30s, and the neo-integralist movements today, the history of Sigma, the green shirts, these are all more relevant than Mussolini, although he may have sparked this movement originally.
And Plinio Salgado had his own plan, right? He had a manifesto, essentially, that laid out his vision of what the future should look like for Brazil, and it had unique Brazilian characteristics.
Euan Marshall: And what happened to the original Integralist movement? And what sparked its revival or at least, you know, allowed it to make some sort of comeback?
Heidi Beirich: Well, what happened to the original, um, original Integralist movement, the one from the 20s and the 1930s, was that it was completely smashed, uh, by Getulio Vargas’ regime. He, Vargas, when he came to power in the 1930s, so the Estado Novo, he viewed, he captured fascist movements, but he viewed them as a threat, and he shut them down very brutally.
So he wanted, you know, he wanted total control, and he didn’t want some mass movement identified with some other person to have any influence in his regime. some other person to have any influence in his regime. So Vargas was pretty hardcore about smashing integralism. And there was even an attempted comeback, sort of a mini coup, where the integralists tried to come back into power by forcing Vargas out and lost that battle.
And just to make a complicated story short, Vargas’ dictatorship ends, Salgado starts another political party up in, I think, in the 1960s, sometime 64 maybe, and some of those people eventually, then you get a series of dictatorships, right, military dictatorships, and you get some people from the Integralist movement joining with some of those regimes that happened in the years that the military was running. of the military was running Brazil.
So they sort of usurped prominent integralists. So that’s, you know, that’s a shorthand version of that, but it means that integralism didn’t go away, right? Prominent figures from that movement were part of the various military dictatorships in various positions, and the ideas continued floating around. The real resurgence, though, is relatively recent in terms of mass movements, big organizations that push a modernized version of integralism.
Euan Marshall: But what was it that made integralism a thing again?
Heidi Beirich: My read of it is that the transition back to democracy, the passage of the Constitution in 1988 and the presidential election in 1989, that period up until the present time, or really to the rise of Bolsonaro. Integralism was in the background. It wasn’t a major manifestation of anything.
There wasn’t huge involvement organizations. But over the years of democratic rule, where there were many allegations of corruption against the various administrations, you know, presidents going to jail, etc., crime being an issue, integralism resurfaced, especially in the early 2000s. There was actually a meeting among integralists that kind of launched this current era.
And I would argue it’s not just about integralist organizations, but the rise of the far right is very much connected to those concerns over corruption, over crime, and people feeling, you know, whether legitimately or not, that the Democratic administrations that had been weren’t solving their problems for them, whether that’s economic inequality, social issues, whatever those things may be, then the corruption sort of layered on top of it, people lost faith in governing institutions.
And that opened space for the far right of all kinds to resurge when it came to integralism, but also just all kinds of different far right movements to arise.
Euan Marshall: And what about Brazil’s extremist groups? Are they more likely to be found in certain areas of the country? You mentioned that integralism is a very Brazilian brand of fascism. And is there now a specific brand of Brazilian extremism? Or is it kind of more of a copy of foreign movements?
Heidi Beirich: Well, let me just say in a larger sense, I think Brazil is following exactly the path that the United States is. Portugal is, where there’s also a version of the integralism there has been in the past, and a whole lot of European countries, Italy to Germany, where the far right is mobilizing and growing. And the political spectrum has shifted from sort of center right and center left political parties to center right parties and the far-right.
Now, I’m simplifying a little bit, but that’s what it looks like and Bolsonaro, who of course brought together all these various far-right factions, is very, very similar to Donald Trump, to Giorgia Maloney, and to others, and of course personal friends with people like the Trump family, in representing a growing, powerful far-right. So Brazil is unfortunately in the mainstream of these things as is the United States, right?
We have an election coming in November and you know, who knows what’s going to happen, but we could end up with a very far right president. It’s possible. So let me talk a little bit about the landscape of the country, Sao Paulo state and those regions, Santa Catarina state, I’m sorry if I’m not saying these things right again.
So you have the Hammerskins which is a neo-Nazi movement founded in Texas here in the United States and has chapters all over the world including in Brazil. But you also have outfits like the Caracas of ABC, translated skinheads from ABC, which are an indigenous skinhead outfit that’s neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic. You have other small groups like Falange de Açao, Steel Falange, which is a flat-out white nationalist group. And what’s interesting about these groups, which have big similarities to a lot of them in the United States, is the percentage of the population in southern Brazil that identifies as white is higher than other parts of the country.
And so, just like in the U.S., you have white nationalist movements that are arising. And much like in the US, you have a lot of Southern Brazilian outfits that are separatist organizations or push for succession, right?
They want to leave Brazil. In particular, they want to leave because they, they tend to denigrate northern parts of the country that have a lot larger black population. So they’re racist, essentially, we have this kind of thing in the US in the south as well, right? Secessionist, racist movements that want to get out goes all the way back to our Civil War.
And I always find it interesting that there were so many American Confederates who, after the Civil War, when slavery was ended in the US, fled to Brazil where they felt that they could preserve their way of life. There’s this interesting relationship between Brazil and the United States on that front.
I would say one thing that is particularly interesting about the integralist movement, so that’s like the Brazilian integralist front, the Brazilian, oh gosh I always forget, linear, I’m never gonna get it right, there’s like three or four big outfits. They’re very, very anti-LGBTQ, right? Anti-queer. Now that, of course, is not something that was talked about back in the 1920s and the 1930s.
That is a modern thing that has happened in recent years. It’s actually true of far-right movements in a lot of places, including in the United States, where our white nationalists have become increasingly anti-LGBTQ2. So that’s a difference with the prior era that we should keep in mind. And anti-woman in many cases, in other words, about women’s reproductive rights and freedoms. And so these are things that you wouldn’t have had happening a long time ago.
And I think this also shows the influence of evangelicals in Brazil, right? You know, I think, what is it, about 50% now of religious people in Brazil are evangelicals and not Catholics, as would have traditionally been the case. But, I mean, that’s a group that has grown relatively fast, right, in recent years. A lot of American evangelicals went down to proselytize in Brazil. And, of course, our evangelical movement here in the United States is also very, very anti-LGBTQ. So that dovetails with these movements. So I think that’s something that is different than in the past. I think that there are other groups. There’s an Italian far-right group that’s active in Brazil. There’s a Russian-based group that’s active in Brazil. So there’s some interesting little other kinds of organizations.
You have groups that are similar to the Neo-Nazi active clubs, which is a transnational movement of guys who basically work out and want to fight the race war. And unfortunately, Brazil, like the United States, many other countries, has a lot of violence coming from these Neo-Nazi movements, including violence by young people in the schools and so on. So that’s something that is very similar.
But once again, what marks Brazil as different, I think, is integralism as a movement, as a continuing movement, and as something that Bolsonaro, who fused all these groups, played to, right, with his slogan being directly out of the Integralist playbook. Major figures in his government were from integralist organizations. So I think when we’re talking about Brazil, we have to keep that in mind. I think the only, the comparison really with integralism is to Portugal and in the past and not so much to other parts of Europe or the United States.
Euan Marshall: Cozying up to extremist groups from Brazil and abroad has long been a Bolsonaro tactic. What has been the impact of this strategy on the public discourse? I mean, what are the consequences of coordinating and sharing tactics with groups from other countries?
Heidi Beirich: Well, you know, Bolsonaro did something similar to what Trump did here in the United States, which is he just flooded the public discourse with hate speech, right? Really terrible statements about women, the LGBTQ population, indigenous people, I mean, real ugly racism and hate, just like Donald Trump did here in the United States to build his base.
So he is as responsible as Trump is for normalizing speech that used to be considered unacceptable and driving it into the mainstream. So that is, that is one terrible aspect of Bolsonaro’s behavior. He also emboldened extremist groups.
So the number of, this is according to Brazilian researchers, the number of sort of neo-Nazi cells on the internet exploded with the rise of Bolsonaro. The number of prosecutions for glorifying the Nazi regime went up by the police. By the time Lula was elected, the security services in Brazil said the number one threat to the country was from these far-right groups.
And of course, Brazil had its own version of our January 6, 2021, and January 8, 2023, when all of these factions united in an attempt to to overthrow the government, right, to undo the presidential election where Bolsonaro lost and Lula won. Now, Bolsonaro and Trump share some other interesting things. They both lied about their election losses. They spread these ideas among the population that, you know, the election was somehow rigged, that they couldn’t
This is the same playbook by these two guys. I will say that Bolsonaro through that Gabinete de Odio, I don’t know if I said it right, was more aggressive in spreading hate speech online. In other words, the administration itself, Bolsonaro’s administration was involved in sowing dissent and hate and so on. Trump did that on his Twitter feed, but we didn’t have a department in the White House that was dedicated to spreading disinformation and lies and so on. The other thing about Trump and Bolsonaro is they’re both kind of COVID deniers,
lied about the pandemic and what it meant. And they actually work together and network through an outfit called CPAC, which is an American conservative conference that used to be a very normal entity, say 10 years ago. In other words, they would talk about lower taxes and smaller government, these American ideas, old school Reagan type conservative ideas. But CPAC now, which is basically run by Bolsonaro’s son out of Brazil. You know, they have a chapter now in Brazil, a chapter in Hungary, where there’s another illiberal person in government, Victor Orban, right? In other countries, Mexico and so on.
CPAC is now a place that bashes gay people, basically bashes immigrants, and brings together people like the Bolsonaros, the Trump’s, the Orbán’s and their acolytes to share tactics and strategize and sow hate. That’s a really, really new phenomenon, but it’s an important place where tactics and ideas among the far right are generated and spread. And Brazil is a really, really important node in that network. And Eduardo Bolsonaro, who essentially hosts CPAC Brazil, is a key figure there and he’s involved in a lot of CPAC activities.
Any time a CPAC pops up, whether it’s in Hungary or somewhere else, there’s bound to be a Bolsonaro on the agenda somewhere. That’s another thing that’s happening. You have layers of networks. You have small neo-Nazi and skinhead organizations. Then you have slightly more complex outfits, maybe secessionist groups and whatnot. And then you have the bigger integralist organizations. And then you just basically have Bolsonaro’s movement that brings together people who agree
with his politics, his anti-indigenous, racist, misogynistic, anti-queer agenda. Right? And that’s a little bit like the United States. I mean, I’m not trying to make the analogy too simple, but in the U.S. we have smaller neo-Nazi groups and white nationalists, and then we have larger conservative groups that have become more radical, like the Heritage Foundation. And then we have MAGA Republicans, Trump Republicans, who like his immigrant-bashing is immigrant bashing rhetoric, is racism and so on, and are the ones who overran the capital here like the Bolsonaristas did in Brasilia, right? So it’s real interesting to see this and then to have on top of it all an international
movement through CPAC and some other organizations that bring the Trumps and the Bolsonaro’s together. And it should not be, you know, we should not take this lightly. I think President Lula has said on more than one occasion that the far right is a serious threat to democracy. So it’s not just about its racism or hate. It’s about democratic rule and the wish to roll back human rights for various populations. That’s what they’re gunning for.
You know, an authoritarian state. That’s why they love Victor Orban because he has really achieved that. And, you know, so he becomes a hero. So we need to be focused on how problematic this is ultimately for multiracial, diverse democracies where everybody is treated, you know, handed the same civil and human rights.
Euan Marshall: As we mentioned at the top of the show, on January 8th, 2023, Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters broke into the buildings that housed the Presidential Office, the Supreme Court and Congress in what was the most frontal attack on democracy since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
And in addition, documents released by the Supreme Court show that the threat of a coup was much more real than people thought. Bolsonaro was accused of coordinating military officers, legal experts and politicians in a plot to flood public discourse with disinformation and stage an old-fashioned military power grab. What can the world learn from Brazil’s experience?
Heidi Beirich: Yeah, I saw the press reports recently that it looks like Bolsonaro may well have, you know, had a hand in directing all of this. Well, first of all, when we see somebody sowing hate and division, we need to understand that this could lead to a democratic assault, right?
It’s not just particular marginalized populations that are going to bear the brunt. Bolsonaro, by spreading lies about the election and the idea, you know, that he could possibly have lost, the same stuff Donald Trump has peddled in the past, and I’m sure will peddle in the future. It is undermining democracy directly.
And these people, at least in the Brazilian case, remains to be seen Trump’s role on January 6th here in the United States, right? There are trials coming. But clearly, they don’t respect democracy enough. They think that they can do what they want. And as a result, have a coup, take over, and run the government according to Bolsonaro’s wishes, and democracy be damned.
That’s the threat here. And that’s the thing that when you look at the rise of the far right all over the world, whether it’s in the recent Portuguese elections, where the Chega party came in very high, or the rise of the AFD in Germany, these things are threatening our entire democratic systems.
I think one thing people forget is that before January 6th here and January 8th in Brazil, there was an attempt to overthrow the German government, a storming of their parliament, and given the rise of AFD in the polls, you see another parallel here, right? And there was a recent scandal in Germany where the AFD had secret meetings with white supremacists about deporting millions of people from the country.
These are the kinds of things that far-right movements are angling for. And I know the immigrant issue isn’t such a big thing in Brazil but the democratic issue is. So this is why we have to be worried about the far-right. This is why we have to keep our eyes on them and be really really concerned whenever the movement is growing.
Euan Marshall: Now, Jair Bolsonaro was often dubbed the Trump of the tropics by the US media. I mean, we at the Brazilian Report are pretty skeptical about making these automatic assumptions about how the 2016 US election might have affected Brazil or how Trump’s loss in 2020 was a precursor to Bolsonaro in 2022. Still, how would you compare what’s happening now with Bolsonaro in Brazil, as in, you know, he may soon get his comeuppance and could go to jail even, to Trump’s situation in the US?
Heidi Beirich: Yeah, well, I think the difference is that Brazil has actually taken this situation much more seriously and, you know, engaged in investigations and so on to figure out what the hell happened on January 8th in a way that has not happened in the United States. I think it’s actually a big deal for Brazilian institutions and for Brazilian democracy in general.
And it’s a very different outcome than what we’re seeing in the United States. Here in the United States over the last three years, there has been a consolidation among Republicans behind Donald Trump. There has been a rewriting of the narrative of January 6th to make it seem like it wasn’t such a big deal. There have been arrests and prosecutions, but never any way to tie it to the top.
The official investigation that happened in the Congress here, the select committee that investigated this, the Republicans refused to work with them, so it wasn’t bipartisan. You know, this is really, really different. There was no ability to work across the aisle to protect the US from a direct threat to its democracy. So we’re, it’s totally different here in the United States than what’s happening in Brazil. And so your point about not being so quick to make analogies is a good one. And also, when I make analogies among far-right actors, that’s among them specifically. That isn’t necessarily about the population, right, the Brazilian population, the American population, etc., and how they might ultimately react.
Euan Marshall: Fascinating stuff, Dr. Beirich. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Heidi Beirich: Anytime I’m always happy to talk about this thank you very much for having me on.
Euan Marshall: If you’d like Explaining Brazil please give us a five-star rating wherever you get your podcasts or better yet subscribe to the Brazilian Report the journalistic engine behind this podcast. We have a subscription based business model and your memberships fuel our journalism and keep us going and growing.
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— Transcribed with Cockatoo
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