Consider This from NPR - Brazil's Presidential Vote Could Have An Impact Beyond The Country's Borders

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

On Sunday, Brazilians will go to the polls to choose between two very different presidential candidates. One is the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, who has been called Latin America's Trump. The other is leftist former president and working class icon, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.The outcome of the presidential runoff vote will of course shape the future of Brazil's democracy. But the vote's impact could also be felt far beyond the country's borders.We hear what the outcome could mean for the future of the Amazon rainforest and efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change. And then, NPR's Shannon Bond explains why conspiracy theories about Brazil's elections are circulating in the United States.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all on the web at theschmidt.org. The two candidates vying for president in Brazil could not be more different. One is the current far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who some see as the Trump of Latin America. Today we have a president who believes in God. He kicked off his campaign touting his record as a president who believes in God, who respects the military and police, and who defends the family. His critics hold him responsible for botched pandemic policies,

also a floundering economy, and the use of misogynistic and racist rhetoric. But his loyal base of supporters, they adore him. Like Joute Cardoza, who told NPR, we Brazilians love Bolsonaro as much as you Americans love Trump. The other candidate has also been president of Brazil. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is an icon of Latin America's left with working-class roots, one of eight children born to poor farmers. In 2018, years after he

left office, he went to prison on corruption charges. But Brazil's Supreme Court annulled his conviction last year, and now he's back. Although Lula's reputation suffered after his conviction, supporters like 68-year-old street cleaner Luis Carlos say that life under the former president was better than these past few years under Bolsonaro. When Lula was president, I was able to put food on the table and buy a home, he said. Some Brazilians say their democracy itself is at stake in Sunday's runoff election. Now, some parallels. In an echo of the sort of disinformation we heard from Trump in 2020,

Bolsonaro has claimed that only widespread voting fraud could keep him from winning. He has also raised unfounded doubts about voting machines. That is why many worry that Bolsonaro would do anything to stay in office. Here's Rio based political analyst Christopher Lynch. What is really urgent is to remove Bolsonaro from power to avoid dictatorship. Consider this. This election will, of course, shape the future of Brazil's democracy, but its impact could also be felt far beyond that country's borders. Those unfounded claims about voting fraud in Brazil, they're being spread here in the U.S. by those who want to cast doubt about American

elections too. And then there's the fact that Brazil is home to the Amazon rainforest and its future is a key factor in any effort to fight climate change all over the world. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Friday, October 28th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Who does the Amazon rainforest belong to? One view says all of us. The Amazon is the world's lungs, a huge carbon sink. Preserving it is a crucial step in preventing catastrophic climate change. That is not how Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro sees it.

It is a fallacy to say that the Amazon is the heritage of humankind. It's him speaking through an interpreter at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, as fires raged through the Brazilian Amazon. Bolsonaro's top diplomat in Washington, Nestor Forrester, underscored that view in an interview with me that same year. We don't want to see the Amazon, you know, surrounded by a big fence for well-off Europeans to come during vacation time to visit, to see the exotic fauna while the 25 million Brazilians are there without opportunity. And under Bolsonaro, huge swaths of the forest have been destroyed to clear land for cattle

or crops or logging. His opponent in Sunday's runoff election, Lula da Silva, promises to put a stop to that and to take aggressive action on climate change. So one way to see Sunday's contest is as a fight over the future of the Amazon. Reporter John Otis tells us about one place where that fight is playing out along a key road that runs through the jungle. The road, known as Highway 319, begins just across the Amazon River from the Brazilian city of Manaus. There's no bridge spanning the two-mile-wide river, so to get across and start our road trip, we take a car ferry. Highway 319 was built in the 1970s. The idea was to connect the jungle to Brazilian cities

and bring more settlers and development to the Amazon region. To some extent, that's what happened. But gradually, Highway 319 fell into disrepair. Today, it's like driving an obstacle course, with crater-sized potholes and rickety bridges. Much of 319 is unpaved and dissolves into mud during the rainy season. President Bolsonaro, who has promoted mining, logging, and ranching in the Amazon, has pledged to fully pave 319 and turn it into a kind of jungle expressway. In July, Brazil's environmental agency granted a preliminary permit to go forward.

Although that permit is still under review, we spot dump trucks and bulldozers upgrading the road. We also find a lot of roadside residents who strongly support the project. Among them is farmer Jose Marconbes. She recalls falling sick with malaria during last year's rainy season. The road was so muddy that even in a four-wheel drive, she was unable to get to a hospital. But jungle roads, even unfinished ones like 319, nearly always bring a flood of newcomers and massive deforestation. Indeed,

all along the highway we come across huge fires like this one. There's about 25-30 head of cattle right in front of me. That's the end game for all of this deforestation and people burning down the jungle because they're trying to open up land for farming and cattle ranching. Under Bolsonaro, 13,000 square miles of Amazon jungle have been destroyed, an area larger than Belgium. An upgraded highway would speed up the destruction, says Giorgio Torres, an indigenous fisherman who has lived in the Amazon for 44 years. I live in a paradise, and we have to take care of it, he says. an indigenous fisherman who has lived in the Amazon for 44 years. I live in a paradise, and we have to take care of it, he says. But most people don't think that way.

They think the rainforest goes on forever. Another road skeptic is Philip Fernseit. He's a biologist at Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research. The better the road gets, the more and more environmental crimes are happening. So you have the land being grabbed along the road, you have more and more deforestation, and you have all of these illegal side roads that are being built. He says turning 319 into a major highway makes little economic sense because it's cheaper to move freight along rivers and the Atlantic Ocean. For settlers who move to remote patches of the Amazon and then

demand roads, Fernside has little sympathy. In Brazil, people do have a right to come and go, but it doesn't mean that you have a right to have the government build a highway at everybody's doorstep. A more optimistic view comes from Eduardo Taveira, the top environmental official in Amazonas State that includes most of the highway. He says improving 319 will help authorities monitor the jungle and stop deforestation. So why not to find a way to make the roads accessible again and avoid deforestation. Why not do that? It's totally possible to do that. However, Bolsonaro has gutted the government agencies that enforce environmental laws.

His opponent in Sunday's election, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, has pledged to take better care of the Amazon. But even da Silva, a leftist former president, says he's willing to discuss paving 319. On our way back to Manaus, the highway takes us across a large bridge spanning a river. But just 12 hours after we drove across it, that bridge collapsed into the water, taking several vehicles with it. That's the sound of rescue teams trying to save some of the victims. But according to government officials, four people died and one is still missing. So, on Highway 319, at least some improvements are urgently needed.

That's John Otis reporting from Brazil. So there's a lot at stake with Sunday's election for the future of the Amazon, and that could ripple out to the rest of the world and the global fight against climate change. But the election in Brazil is spilling over its borders in another way. Conspiracies about the election are making the rounds in the U.S. Some of the same people who pushed lies about the 2020 U.S. presidential election being stolen are spreading disinformation about Brazil's vote. People like former Trump advisor and current podcaster Steve Bannon, who called Brazil a... Very stark warning to MAGA and to all the Republicans of the games that are being played in these elections. NPR's Shannon Bond covers misinformation and its impacts on democracy.

She's been reporting on all this. Hey, Shannon. Hey, Mary Louise. Okay, I want to state up front, just for the record, again, these are conspiracy theories. There is zero evidence to support them. But so that we can understand their grip on some people, what is it these theories are claiming? Well, broadly, it's this idea that Brazil's election is being rigged against incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, and specifically that voting machines made either by Smartmatic or Dominion voting systems are being used to do this, even though neither company's machines are being used in Brazil.

And you'll remember, Mary Louise, election deniers here in the U.S. falsely claimed that these companies, right, were how the 2020 election was stolen, that their software was used to flip votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. You know, that has led both Smartmatic and Dominion to file multiple defamation lawsuits against Trump supporters and right-wing news outlets that aired those lies. But this is getting recirculated in Brazil. I spoke with Lee Foster, who's an analyst at the Aletheia Group. He's been tracking these claims. And he says this shows just how sticky these lies can be. Once they gain traction, people will start applying those to other kind of events and build out these broad conspiracy theories around them. Okay, so that's a little bit of the background of what's happening in Brazil. But help us understand why right-wing

activists in the U.S. are so interested in what's happening in Brazil. These right-wing figures like Steve Bannon, they are very focused on what is happening in Brazil. I mean, first of all, there's just a lot of parallels between Bolsonaro and Trump. You know, they present themselves as these sort of populist strongmen. There's been a lot of similarities in how they've run their campaigns and appeals. And Steve Bannon in particular has been warning about these, what he sees as this global conspiracy on the left to steal elections. And he's really made Brazil a centerpiece of these claims. And he's talked a lot about election fraud.

While he himself has not specifically talked about Dominion and Smartmatic, he had someone on his show who was making this false claim that Smartmatic was being used in Brazil. And I think if you step back, what is happening here, Bannon and these others, they're using these baseless claims about election fraud in Brazil that draw from the baseless claims about election fraud in 2020 to then spin forward to say, you know, look, this could happen again in the midterms. And it creates this feedback loop. Total feedback loop. And I suppose the fact that these conspiracies are popping up

in other countries on other continents is testimony to how hard they can be to shut down. Are there any lessons we can learn? We are learning from what other countries are doing, what election officials in other countries are doing to try to shut down misinformation? Yeah, this is so interesting. When I started looking into this story, I found out that similar lies had spread in Australia. And so I ended up talking to Tom Rogers, who runs Australia's elections. You know, they had these lies spreading on social media ahead of their election that Dominion voting machines were being used, even though Australians don't use any kind of electronic machines to vote. I have the pleasure of being the CEO of one of the world's last great analog events where people use paper and pencil to vote. So if you're going to pick a conspiracy theory,

you'd think you'd pick one that maybe had more traction. But, you know, as ridiculous as these claims were, you know, Rogers and his staff, you know, they realized this was a serious risk. So they responded pretty aggressively to shut down these rumors on social media. And they put up YouTube videos, Twitter posts. They were largely successful. But I think this really illustrates the challenge. No matter how absurd these claims are, they can erode trust in voting and democracy. And that is exactly what we're seeing here with these efforts in the U.S. and Brazil, this concerted effort to undermine trust. Reporting there from NPR's Shannon Bond. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York,

working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless Thank you.