Brazilian writer JP Cuenca, on a street in São Paulo Renato Parada
In the midst of the presidential election campaign, writer JP Cuenca (Rio de Janeiro, 44 years old) is working on a film about the progress of evangelism in Brazil. He wants to delve into a phenomenon of enormous proportions, having been the target of a legal crusade by more than a hundred pastors from one of the largest evangelical churches, an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro. Plaintiffs are seeking damages in scattered and remote cities for a damning message he wrote on Twitter. “Brazil is a continental country that is changing its religion very quickly, and this has obvious, direct political consequences that are closely linked to Bolsonarianism,” he says in a video call interview from his home in Sao Paulo. “We need to understand this phenomenon in order to live in this country in the coming decades, to engage in Christian conversation, to listen, to go where the other is and to look for common ground,” he reflects.
“Brazilians will not be free until they hang the last Bolsonaro with the entrails of the last pastor of the universal church,” he wrote two years ago, paraphrasing a metaphor from nearly three centuries. He deleted the tweet on the advice of his lawyers. Since then, he has won nearly a hundred lawsuits, although dozens remain pending, and he is pleased that the church’s legal harassment investigation can set a precedent that will prevent similar cases. He also received insults and threats. He had previously been caught up in another surreal situation when he learned he had been dead to the authorities for a while, an experience he discovered fictionalized in Me That He Was Dead (Planeta, 2017).
Questions. Where is Brazil headed?
Answer. Regardless of what happens in the elections, we will have very complex and eventful years. To use an Argentine word, with a lot of quilombo. I think that the fascist moods in Brazil were always there, but they were dormant. Now they have found a political vector in the Bolsonaros, but it does not end with this family. surpasses them. If they go to prison, they lose their power; [pero] These people will continue to be armed and will continue to look for leaders of the extreme right. It’s like the door to hell has been opened, and I feel like for many years we’ll have to fight over spaces everywhere: in the legal system, in Congress, in the press, on the street. I come from Rio, a state completely ruled by the militias. Brazil is a country in perpetual conflict, forged by ethnocide, slavery, massacres and the destruction of nature. Since we have not resolved any of these traumas, they are still alive.
P You filmed Bolsonaro’s violent act on the occasion of the bicentenary of independence. Did you manage to turn the commemoration ceremony into an election campaign?
R I don’t think he won votes but he showed power because there were so many people there. Although I respect Lula and will vote for him, that day he made a statement that I felt was wrong. He said there were only whites over 40 years old. Is not true. There were people of all colors, of all ages; many blacks, women, even gays. I thought it was awesome. Bolsonaro is a homophobic, misogynistic, outspoken racist. And there were these people calling it a myth, totally passionate about it. It’s a very powerful folk force. I think we will win the election, but these people will carry on. And she’s armed. They have political momentum, they are now the owners of the revolutionary drive. The left is conservative, these are the punks who are against the system and the big press. Like Trumpism.
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P What impressed you?
R How cheerful fascism is and how Bolsonaro is a mixture of clown with evangelical pastor and TV presenter. It’s just entertainment. No matter how much they lose, it’s a highly mobilized third party. We have more votes, but they have more mobilization.
P Christian churches helped bring Bolsonaro to power
R Especially the evangelicals because there was a breaking point. Bolsonaro was very adept at approaching this community. He married an evangelical because he’s a Catholic. At a certain point he starts to really get into the cults and make political pacts. But the moment he loses power, all that changes.
P There are days when there is no talk of campaign proposals, only of religion. Do Churches Still Matter?
R To. They organize themselves, they run candidates, they have a faction in Congress. They are doing what the left stopped doing when it came to power: grassroots work, which means creating communities, talking to people. That’s very powerful. Evangelical churches are places of encounter, they have become centers of culture, work and social work. You have to understand this phenomenon and look at it carefully. These churches succeeded in making Christ a bastion of the right; nothing can be less sincere than Jesus Christ.
P How does someone who has already written about his own death, as he discovered in I discovered that he was dead, take threats from fundamentalists?
R It was pretty awkward the day I discovered all the documents, there’s my name, my birth certificate, in the dead man’s pocket. But it’s far worse to receive threats like photos of knives and guns and people saying they want to kill you. It’s less comfortable being threatened.
P Two out of three voters fear politically motivated attacks. How did Brazil get to this point?
P It was a crime with many perpetrators. For me, the main culprits are the press and television, including the one that is against Bolsonaro today, because they have spent many years inciting the population against the PT with reporting that has been completely distanced from the events. This laid a foundation for the later growth of Bolsonarianism. For me, the audiovisual work that infected Brazil with the neo-fascist virus is the film Tropa de Elite, which helped to naturalize a discourse on the elimination of minorities. In the past, the death of children in the favelas was not applauded. There are many culprits, but since I come from the arts and press fields, I’ll stick with these two.
P Do you share the fear of a coup?
R Not at the moment. Trump lost the election, the US Secretary of Defense released an official statement supporting democracy and confidence in the Brazilian electoral system, the Ambassador to Brasilia did the same. They were strong statements by key figures in the US government. If the United States doesn’t support it, the press, the banks, who supports it? The agribusiness destroying the Amazon and the military? This power struggle seems unbalanced to me. I no longer believe in the coup threat at this point, I believed in it before Trump lost, the Bolsonarist movement is umbilically linked to Trumpism. Now, in this post-Bolsonaro country, we have more armed civilians than armed soldiers and police officers. This is unprecedented. These people live in a parallel world fed by fake news. I tell my friends and family not to go out on the streets that day.
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