—Fabrício Bertini Pasquot Polido and Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) Brazil faces the most critical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic since its beginning in 2020. Death tolls soared to new highs – with more than 300,000 deaths by the end of March 2021 – and the National Public Health System

Tomorrow Knows Better: A New Inflection Point in Brazil’s Democracy?
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development Brazil is again in the spotlight, and, as has been a common narrative at least since President Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, not for a good reason. News from everywhere has underlined that the country is not only under a health

The Collision between Bolsonaro and the Sovereignty of Science: The Courts Step In
—João Vitor Cardoso, University of Chile Faculty of Law[1] Introduction On Saturday, March 28, a federal court in Rio de Janeiro banned the Brazilian government from disseminating propaganda against confinement measures aimed at controlling the coronavirus pandemic. The federal judge gave the government 24 hours to publish an official statement explaining that its “Brazil Cannot

The News Media and Democracy under Bolsonaro: A “Trump of the Tropics”?
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development Democratic backsliding is certainly a hot topic in Brazil, especially after the election of the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Such a trend could already be observed in an empirical study Zachary Elkins wrote based on the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) Index