British interest in Latin America, and its biggest country, Brazil, has been disgracefully fitful. It woke up when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly beat Jair Bolsonaro, the disastrous tree-felling extreme rightist, last October. It even caused the BBC to lead its morning news bulletin in January, when a mob inspired by Bolsonaro and the example of the Capitol riot in the US two years ago attempted to take over the centre of Brasília.
But what is really going on in this vast country of 203 million people? How was it that Bolsonaro, an obscure congressman who had dedicated a vote to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s leftist successor, and was a frank admirer of the dictatorship that Lula and Rousseff had struggled to overthrow, ever got elected as president in 2018?
