Brazilians learned they have a gay governor; LGBTQ acceptance is expanding in some countries; and Chile adopted full marriage equality.
Media coverage of the December 8-10 Summit for Democracy has largely focused on President Joe Biden’s remarks, coupled with critical reactions from China, Russia, and skeptical U.S. pundits. Few U.S. commentators seem to have bothered to listen to the three days of often thoughtful remarks by other world leaders and the many intelligent, emotionally engaging panelists representing a broad swath of civil society, business, and academia.
World leaders will converge on Glasgow this Sunday for the UN Climate Change Summit (COP 26). This year’s summit has garnered particular attention for its implications in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Several major Latin American leaders spoke this week at the 76th session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York City, largely echoing common concerns about climate change and the unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines internationally.
On September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, right-wing activists and self-proclaimed Bolsonaristas rallied in support of President Jair Bolsonaro, his beleaguered administration, and his escalating attacks on the country’s supreme court and other institutions.
For the past year or so, quantitative polls produced by various institutes have been revealing the constant decline in Jair Bolsonaro’s popularity throughout various social and socioeconomic strata. However, there has not yet been conducted a study that comprehensively captures the feelings and perceptions of the Bolsonarista electorate in depth.
The political crisis that has dragged on in Brazil since 2013 reached its most critical point three weeks ago. Harassed by the legal siege against his far-right allies, President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro doubled down and asked the Federal Senate to impeach justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF, Brazil’s highest court). This is the first such request to be made in the 132 years of the Federative Republic of Brazil.
While visiting Brazil last week, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned President Jair Bolsonaro against interfering with the country’s upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for October of next year. In recent weeks—amid slumping poll numbers, a staggered economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to kill an average of 1,000 Brazilians per day—Bolsonaro has taken to criticizing Brazil’s electronic voting system as vulnerable to massive voter fraud and has threatened to delay next year’s elections if a system reliant on paper ballots is not adopted in its place.
In Brazil—still in the throes of the pandemic, as evidenced by the country’s ignominious passage through the threshold of 500,000 dead from COVID-19—public dissatisfaction with the government of President Jair Bolsonaro collided this week with a looming socio-environmental catastrophe: a historic drought that has parched large swathes of Brazil’s Centro-Oeste (i.e., the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul) and populous southeast (in particular, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Paraná, three of the most populous states in the country) in advance of the annual Amazon wildfire season.
