Kristina Hinz

This article analyses the evolution of the Brazilian political space in the legislative and executive powers, focusing specifically on the increasing convergence between security and Neo-Pentecostal actors and affairs, culminating in Jair Bolsonaro’s election as president in October 2018. By analyzing government proceedings, legislative proposals and journalistic materials, this article traces the profiles of the main pro-armament/ security and Neo-Pentecostal associations in the Brazilian legislature. Taking the Evangelical Parliamentary Front and the Parliamentary Front of Public Security as objects of study, this study demonstrates their growing mutual influence and alignment between 2011 and 2019.

As the COVID-19 crisis reveals how different forms of discrimination intertwine and must be addressed collectively, the present moment is also an opportunity to radically rethink taken-for-granted policy approaches and introduce new, decentralized forms of organization. In an attempt to shed light on the myriad of experiences of women across the world and their work to mobilize, resist, and foster solidarity in times of COVID-19, we are launching a special dossier on the gendered impacts of the pandemic. This collection brings together a series of articles written by female activists, trade unionists, human rights defenders, and journalists based and active in countries of the “Global South”.

In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, criminal groups have taken control of five favelas in Rio’s outskirts, establishing what they call the Israel Complex (Complexo do Israel). Drug traffickers and paramilitaries, historic rivals in the dispute for territorial control, have joined forces to advance their illegal business. The Israel Complex is led by Álvaro Rosa, a drug lord who goes under the nickname Aaron - the biblical brother of Moses - in alliance with former police officers linked to the paramilitary group Crime Bureau (Escritório do Crime), a well-known death squad held responsible for several crimes, including the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco in 2018.

The establishment of the Israel Complex marks a new phenomenon, even for crisis-prone Rio de Janeiro: the unification of drug trafficking factions, paramilitary forces, and neo-Pentecostal churches, waging a “holy war” not only against competing criminal groups, but also against Afro-Brazilian religions.

The rise of a newly powerful political Right in the US, Brazil and Poland, which favours traditional, conservative Christian moral values, including the defence of a heterocentric family model and the questioning of reproductive and sexual rights, has opened up the possibility of new links between conservative, right-wing and political Islamist forces in Muslim countries. The similarity in the way that certain Christian and Islamic forces employ religion – to construct an ideal that claims to defend human life and the family – is the basis for an alliance that sets itself apart from hegemonic concepts of human rights as formulated and defended in the multilateral forums of the UN and the WHO.

This new alignment in foreign policy exposes the increased international influence of political-religious factions, revealing unexpected alliances between Catholic, evangelical and Islamic moralisms in the area of reproductive justice. These have one main goal: to diminish women’s autonomy and agency to decide what they want for their own bodies.