Explaining Brazil
Explaining Brazil
The Brazilian Report
News from Brazil, by The Brazilian Report — an independent media outlet uniquely positioned to offer an insider’s view of current affairs in Brazil.
How to read Brazil's  election polls
Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro are statistically tied less than two weeks before Brazil's first round, and a flood of contradictory polls is feeding claims that pollsters are rigging the race. Rafael Nishimura, director of sampling operations at the Univers...
Sep 23
1 hr 5 min
Can Brazil's Supreme Court survive an election?
For years, Brazil's Supreme Court picked fights with Congress and the presidency. This month it turned on itself. On September 15, the full court sat for more than seven hours to answer a question it has dodged for 130 years, and walked away without an...
Sep 17
41 min
Civil war at the Brazilian Supreme Court
Brazil's Supreme Court is facing what may be the worst crisis in its history. Justice André Mendonça unsealed the Banco Master investigation, exposing messages between the bank's former CEO and Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Now two factions of the court...
Sep 9
36 min
The first surprise of the 2016 election
Two polls released Monday shook the political establishment. Augusto Cury, of the small Avante party, took third place in both: 11% in Nexus's survey, 7.8% in Atlas Intel's. The numbers force rivals and analysts to take Cury seriously for the first tim...
Sep 1
38 min
What's wrong with the Brazilian Congress
Brazil's 2026 campaign is officially underway, and almost all the attention will be on the presidential race. That's a problem, because power in Brazil is increasingly won and lost in Congress — where the budget is controlled and where any president's ...
Aug 20
43 min
A visa, a snub, and a reopened wound
The US State Department revoked the visa of Brazil's ambassador to Washington ( https://newsletters.brazilian.report/p/us-brazil-ambassador-viotti-argentina-russia-putin ) and said the quiet part out loud: it is retaliation for Brasília withholding agr...
Aug 10
34 min
Brazilian trade: Life after Washington
The US now takes less than 10% of Brazil's exports — the smallest share in decades — and Washington's tariff wall is accelerating a realignment that was already underway. Gustavo Ribeiro speaks with trade consultant Welber Barral, a former Brazilian fo...
Aug 4
27 min
An imported playbook for Brazil's elections
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro used his turn at Debating Brazil — an event series in which Brazilian presidential candidates present their vision of the country to foreign ambassadors — to revive discredited claims about electronic voting fraud and to promis...
Jul 24
40 min
Flávio Bolsonaro has a few problems to deal with
On this episode of Explaining Brazil, Gustavo Ribeiro, editor-in-chief of The Brazilian Report, talks with James Green, a historian at Brown University, about the fracturing landscape of Brazil's 2026 presidential race. Much of the conversation turns o...
Jul 13
46 min
Brazil's crime syndicates are now terrorist organizations
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated the Comando Vermelho (Red Command, or CV) and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC) as foreign terrorist organizations. The Brazilian Report's editor-in-chief, Gustavo Ribeir...
Jun 2
41 min
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