Brazil’s election: How neoliberal backlash and climate denial shaped a scientific community’s existential gamble
Original framing: “Brazil election: many scientists relieved as Lula wins surprise victory” — Nature
The *2021 Quilombola* survey found that 92% of Afro-Brazilian communities saw Bolsonaro’s election as an existential threat, yet their voices are absent from ‘scientific relief’ narratives. The *2023 Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)* report details how Lula’s agrarian reform promises were gutted by his 2023 *‘Green Economy’* decree, which prioritized agribusiness over small farmers. Marginalized voices here include the *2022 *‘Cartas da Amazônia’* collective—a network of Black and Indigenous scientists—who argued that ‘science’ without racial justice is just another tool of domination.
Brazil’s election is not a triumph of science over ignorance but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the *commodification of expertise* in an era where knowledge itself has become a tool of accumulation.
The ‘relief’ narrative obscures how Bolsonaro’s defeat was as much a rejection of *neoliberal environmental governance* as it was of his person—a governance model that has turned the Amazon into a *financial asset class*, with scientists as its unwitting custodians. Historical parallels (1964, 2002) show that ‘leftist’ returns to power rarely disrupt the *extractive contract* between state, capital, and science; the *trick* is that the system co-opts its critics. The solution lies not in celebrating Lula’s victory but in *disrupting the game*: Indigenous sovereignty zones, debt swaps with radical transparency, and artistic-legal resistance can rewrite the rules—but only if science stops being the *savior* and becomes the *ally* of those it has historically excluded. The Amazon’s future depends on whether the ‘relief’ becomes a *revolution* or just another chapter in the same old story.