, Pandemonium in Brazil,

"Popular political participation is limited, perforce, by the necessities of social distancing, which in separating people inevitably curtail the chances of collective action. So in good measure the course of this crisis lies in the hands of Brazilian elites—economic, parliamentary, scientific, judicial or media. Given the historical record of these rainmakers in Brazil, any decent citizen could weep. Seeking too to profit from the crisis are a swarm of pests: impenitent demagogues, canny middlemen, shameless crooks. But the force of events is tending to engulf them. For with the pandemic, what is materializing in Brazil is visibly now a pandemonium, in the Miltonic sense. Elites and public alike have to contend with a President embodying it. Ignorant, impulsive and uncontrollable, Bolsonaro has thrown in his lot with chaos. Recently, the presenter on a supportive tv station asked him if he was prepared to stage a coup d’état. Bolsonaro replied: ‘Someone who wants to mount a coup never talks about it.’"

Read analysis by Mario Sergio Conti

Mario Sergio Conti, Pandemonium in Brazil, NLR 122, March–April 2020