{"id":66084,"date":"2025-07-14T23:43:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T23:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/66084\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T23:43:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T23:43:10","slug":"a-netflix-documentary-shows-what-happened-to-the-trump-of-the-tropics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/66084\/","title":{"rendered":"A Netflix documentary shows what happened to \u201cthe Trump of the Tropics.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I watched Petra Costa\u2019s Oscar-nominated 2019 documentary The Edge of Democracy<\/a>, it was impossible not to be struck by the similarities between her native Brazil\u2019s slide toward authoritarianism and the United States\u2019 own political trajectory. In her new movie Apocalypse in the Tropics, the resonances have only grown more pronounced, and more frightening.<\/p>\n

Opening with a group of Christian activists blessing the desks in the country\u2019s National Congress Palace before the opening of a legislative session in 2016, the movie, which is now streaming on Netflix, charts the rapid rise of evangelical Christianity as a political force in Brazil. Costa calls it \u201cone of the fastest religious shifts in human history,\u201d with the percentage of Brazilians who identify as evangelical jumping sixfold over the past 40 years, to nearly a third of the population. The country remains majority Catholic, but the change Costa documents isn\u2019t so much about numbers as it is about evangelicals\u2019 understanding of themselves as a political force, and their leaders\u2019 determination to steer the country.<\/p>\n

The daughter of pro-democracy activists and the granddaughter of one of the founders of one of the country\u2019s largest oil companies, Costa has the kind of access filmmakers would kill for, and enough political intuition to have started filming Jair Bolsonaro, who was swept into Brazil\u2019s presidency in 2019 on a wave of far-right populism, years before he was even a viable candidate. But while the movie gets up close with both Bolsonaro and Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, the leftist who ousted Bolsonaro from office in 2023, her primary interest is not in the country\u2019s rulers but in in the people they take their cues from, especially the televangelist Silas Malafaia.<\/p>\n

Malafaia, who founded his own branch of the Assemblies of God church in 1993, has been involved in Brazilian politics since 2002, when he backed Lula\u2019s first successful presidential bid. But he broke with Lula as the church\u2019s, and his own, power grew, and in 2018 was instrumental in elevating Bolsonaro, then a little-known federal deputy, to the presidency. A recent convert who, Costa suggests, only embraced his wife\u2019s evangelical faith out of political expediency, Bolsonaro pushed a nakedly authoritarian form of politics that was heavy on rural resentment and violent rhetoric, and despite his relatively thin qualifications, his followers came, or were coaxed, to believe that his lack of obvious capabilities was precisely what allowed him to be a vessel for the will of God. Costa doesn\u2019t exactly wink at the camera at this point\u2014she largely remains off-screen, although her narration, in both English and Portuguese, conveys a sense of her personal connection to the country\u2019s fate, and her devastation as it turns rightward\u2014but she doesn\u2019t need to connect the dots for American viewers to feel like this all sounds awfully familiar. (This year\u2019s Oscar\u2013winning I\u2019m Still Here<\/a>, set during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s, offered a similarly chilling sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu.)<\/p>\n

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    It\u2019s been years, perhaps decades, since American documentary filmmakers were able to get as close to their nation\u2019s president as Costa does here with hers. (There\u2019s a case to be made that, in the U.S., D.A. Pennebaker both helped inaugurate the genre, with 1960\u2019s Primary<\/a>, and, with 1993\u2019s The War Room<\/a>, closed it out.) So if Apocalypse in the Tropics casts a revealing light on U.S. politics, it\u2019s less because the two countries\u2019 histories are precisely parallel\u2014among other things, there\u2019s no U.S. equivalent for the way our government has meddled with Brazil\u2019s\u2014than because the evangelical influence on Brazilian politics is a little less camouflaged, a little easier to spot. When he lost reelection in 2023, Bolsonaro refused to admit defeat and urged his followers to resist the result, which led to some setting up camp outside army bases and demanding the military install him directly. At first, Costa says, Bolsonaro was less inclined to push for an uprising, leaving the country for his house in Orlando, Florida. It\u2019s Malafaia, she suggests, who stiffened his resolve. She pauses and rewinds, Zapruder-like, a clip of the speech when Bolsonaro, perhaps paraphrasing the book of Deuteronomy, tells a gathering of his followers to \u201cGo fight, and I will be with you<\/a>.\u201d Given that the only other time in the film Bolsonaro cites chapter and verse is John 8:32 (\u201cYou shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free\u201d), it\u2019s a little surprising to see him departing from the Bible\u2019s Wikiquotes page. But that\u2019s only until Costa replays the footage and catches Bolsonaro nervously shooting a sideways glance at Malafaia beside him on the dais, and Malafaia nodding in gleeful approval once he\u2019s recited the desired text.<\/p>\n

    Bolsonaro\u2019s lightly coded call for insurrection leads to an assault on the foundations of the country\u2019s democracy, only two days after the second anniversary of Jan. 6. In Brasilia\u2019s Three Powers Square, rioters stormed and laid waste to buildings devoted to each branch of the country\u2019s government. But the similarities end there. In Brazil, the courts\u2014presumably once their smashed windows had been replaced\u2014held Bolsonaro accountable and banned him from running for office until 2030. It\u2019s those consequences that Donald Trump now seeks to punish with brute economic force, threatening a crippling 50 percent tariff on Brazil in retaliation for what he calls a \u201cwitch hunt.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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    Costa is far more concerned with her own country\u2019s politics than ours; the only time the U.S. comes up in Apocalypse in the Tropics is when she describes the country\u2019s 1970s plan to replace anti-colonialist liberation theology with a form of Christianity more friendly to individualism and corporate interests. But there\u2019s no way to watch the movie and come away with an intact sense of American exceptionalism. We believed our institutions were too strong, our system too brilliantly conceived, to fall prey to the threats that menaced other democracies around the world. But that belief was our Achilles\u2019 heel, a form of unexamined arrogance that prevented\u2014and, in many cases, still prevents\u2014Americans from seeing what is going on right in front of them. Brazil\u2019s example might even offer hope to Americans wondering if the pendulum will ever swing back. But first we\u2019d have to drop the idea that it can\u2019t happen here, and understand the ways in which it already has.<\/p>\n

    Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I watched Petra Costa\u2019s Oscar-nominated 2019 documentary The Edge of Democracy, it was impossible not to be…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":66085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[4214,7837,434,69,171,46835,53,4659,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-66084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-brazil","9":"tag-democracy","10":"tag-documentaries","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-evangelicals","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-netflix","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114854245413291773","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}