Maybe that Karl Marx had some good ideas? Religion and Politics, when mixed, prove to be a potent, but VERY dangerous partnership, causing all sorts of issues across the globe (Crusades anyone?) and in the US for years. Apocalypse in the Tropics shows that it’s not just a North American problem; Brazil has similar concerns when the pair intermingle, and are now on a path that’s become all too familiar to anyone who’s read a history book or pays any attention at all to US Politics today.
Petra Costa has been following Brazilian politics for almost a decade in film now, winning all sorts of awards for her previous doc The Edge of Democracy. So, Apocalypse in the Tropics is the inevitable sequel. In this case, Costa looks at how the economic crises of the early 2010s has caused Brazilians to seek hope from other places. Enter Silas Malafaia, a televangelist riding a wave of growing Evangelical beliefs in the country (now up to 30%! of the population). That’s a big voting block, which, coupled with the corruption and issues with previous President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula for short), Malafaia elevates fringe politician Jair Bolsonaro to the top of Brazil’s political ticket, earning him president from 2019 to 2023.
Costa’s doc feels like her performing a forensic diagnosis on her country after it died in 2022. She goes through great detail explaining to the outsiders exactly what happened during the last Presidential Term in Brazil. She lays all the pieces out: the evangelical rise, Malafaia’s importance and belief systems, internal politics in the country, and the boiling point the country was at due to the last election cycle. Her success with the last documentary made Costa a hot commodity; as such, she got INCREDIBLE access to the key players in the election. She gets interviews with Lula, and also Silas Malafaia, Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes when they’re both together planning their election campaigns and such, as if we were in closed door Cabinet meetings with Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. Costa voices over the doc, using it as her coping mechanism coming to terms with Bolsonaro’s scary rhetoric that resonated with so many people. Religion can be a potent motivating factor turns out, and Costa shows how the politician and televangelist use those feelings for their own interest, actively comingling religion and politics into a force of nature, propelling Jair to the Presidency.
But you can’t just use fear and faith forever. The covid pandemic shows the ugly side of Bolsonaro and Malafaia’s union. Both actively distrusted science, and as a result didn’t invest any money into vaccinations. This left Brazil with the 2nd highest (behind the US) death toll rate from Covid 19. Instead of learning and growing from those mistakes, that evangelic power turns fascist, and doubles down on the “lies” of all those deaths, forcing people to not believe what they see with their own two eyes. Bolsonaro as well goes on political witch hunts, painting Lula and other rivals as evildoers, justifying his imprisonment of them. Costa goes deep again, using her access and Bolsonaro/Malafaia’s words to show how they truly believe they are ordained by God, and therefore are perfect vessels for his will, and therefore Lula is bascially the antichrist, there to get in his way and bring a worse evil to the Brazilian people. From the US point of view this is all too familiar, as the documentarian lays out brilliantly and clearly how religion and power literally opiate the masses, and inevitably lead to a lust for power among the leaders. So any result of the next election that, say, they don’t win, is actually not possible because that’s not God’s plan. And when your base believes the devil has taken power away from your prophets? Let’s just say Bolsonaro was studying Trump and how January 6th worked out in the US.
The end of the doc really makes you feel like there was an Apocalypse in the Tropics. But the final cards indicate there’s still hope to be found that the Brazilians can find their way out of the weeds. I hope the American people use their Netflix subscriptions to give this one a look, and hopefully get some fresh eyes on what exactly has been happening in the US and how eerily similar the situation is. Fascists of a feather flock together I guess.