Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro's Brazil by Glenn Greenwald

Abstract

Reviewed by: Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro's Brazil by Glenn Greenwald José de Arimatéia da Cruz Greenwald, Glenn. Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro's Brazil. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021. Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and the award-winning author of No Place to Hide (2014). He is no stranger to controversy and investigative reporting. In 2013 he had a front seat in the controversial WikiLeaks scandal, which exposed the National Security Agency's covert operation to access emails and phone conversations of world leaders, including [End Page 228] former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. In Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro's Brazil, Greenwald chronicles the slow death of democracy in Brazil under the leadership of Jair Bolsonaro and his attempts to transform Brazil's feckless democracy into his personal fiefdom to advance a right-wing neoliberal economic and political agenda while undermining thirty years of democratic consolidation and participatory citizenship. While Brazil has had thirty years of democratic experience, the political system is still unstable, rough, driven by systematic corruption, and plagued by violence and nostalgia for authoritarian rule (12). It is under this guise of democracy that authoritarianism was offered as the solution to Brazil's endemic corruption, thereby providing an environment conducive to the rise of Bolsonaro—who is also known in Latin America as the "Trump of the Tropics." The Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato) and the Big Monthly Payment (Mensalão) scandals, in which the Workers' Party (PT) and other parties were caught buying and selling votes in Congress, was portrayed by Bolsonaro and his right-wing political associates as evidence of the corruption plaguing Brazil perpetrated by the PT. The only solution, according to the right-wing movement, was the ousting of the democratically elected government of Dilma Rousseff and the end of the PT's rule. According to Greenwald, Bolsonaro shocked the country, the continent, and the world by winning the 2018 presidential election in the second round, beating the PT's candidate, Fernando Haddad, a former mayor of São Paulo (17). Greenwald goes on to argue that by winning that election, Bolsonaro became one of "the most fanatical and unstable far-right extremists to govern any large democracy in quite some time" (17). Despite Bolsonaro's claim to be a political outsider, he has been a constant player in Brazil's political arena. He was an Army captain during the years of the dictatorship, only to be expelled in 1988 for planning to detonate small bombs on military installations in protest of what he regarded as unjustly low soldier salaries (19). Despite his expulsion from the barracks, Bolsonaro continued to be an ardent supporter of the regime, calling the 1964 coup d'état a "democratic and popular revolution" (19). He had two complaints against the military regime in power from 1964 to 1989. One was the low salary soldiers received. The other was that the military did not go far enough, meaning the military in power did not kill enough communist sympathizers. Bolsonaro is a chameleonic politician. He can be charismatic on one hand while on the other he is a talented demagogue, misogynist, homophobe, and religious fanatic. [End Page 229] While running for president, members of the LGBT community were his favorite political target. As Greenwald points out, "anti-LBGT hatred was a key driver of Bolsonaro's popularity, and with the 2018 elections, we had to accept that he, his family, and his party had just become the most powerful players in all of Brazil" (108). During his campaign for the presidency, Bolsonaro was victim of a knife attack, which not only put the presidential election in limbo but also raised his status. Operation Car Wash and the Mensalão were also two political crises that led to the fall of the PT from grace. However, neither political crisis contributed to the fall of Rousseff. Rousseff was impeached in 2016 on the ground that she had committed "crimes of fiscal responsibility." The trumped-up charges were that Rousseff was involved in "an obscure and highly technical budgetary...