A must see for everyone concerned about the state of our Republic is Petra Costa’s 2024 documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics. Ms. Costa captures the essence of the far right wing evangelical movement in Brazil that pushed Jair Bolsonaro into the presidency in 2018. Amazing how this was almost a textbook copy of Trump’s MAGA movement in 2016 that pushed him into our presidency. Brazil is filled with evangelicals similar to the group that writer/scholar Chris Hedges labeled in our country as Christian Fascists. Imagine that over 30% of the Brazilian Congress were ( and even are now) evangelicals…many of them actual pastors. They made it into a ‘ For or Against’ movement with Jesus as the antidote to the ‘ Left wing Communists’ who ran Brazil before Bolsonaro. They actually conned many in the nation into thinking that the former president, luiz Inacio Lula da , was crooked and put him in prison for over a year and a half. Finally the courts realized this scam and released him in 2019.
Guess what happened next? Lula ran again for president in 2022 and defeated Bolsonaro. A mirror of the Trump story was how Bolsonaro and his far right wing Cabal of evangelicals and super rich business people sold the public, before that election, that it would be rigged! Trump and his MAGA Cabal did the same thing in 2020, two years prior. Then, to mirror Trump and his thugs, Bolsonaro and his same ‘Jesus loving’ evangelicals attacked the Brazilian capitol with a riot similar to the one here on Jan 6th, 2021. Believe it or not, they even had a character dressed like Jacob Chansley, the Q Shamon who carried his horn into the legislative chambers during the Jan. 6th insurrection attempt. The Bolsonaro rioters trashed their government’s buildings as a mirror to what the Trump incited crowd did here.
This is as if we all are being part of some ‘Black Comedy’ that tragically is not at all funny! Does anyone who watched Seinfeld remember the episodes about Bizarro Jerry? There was a group of guys who were not quite like Jerry and his pals, yet fit the bill to be out of focus mirror images of them. Such it is from this documentary how close the far right wing Brazilians seemed to mimic the MAGA mayhem. The good news for all of us who resist this madness is that Bolsonaro is on the verge of being indicted for conspiring to stage a coup after his defeat in 2022. Can we hope and pray (yes evangelicals here, lots of us do believe in prayer to the almighty) that Trump finds his just dessert someday?
Watch the film on Netflix or other venues and tell your friends.
July, 2025