Forrest Hylton

‘Tá na hora de Jair/arrumar mala e já ir/já ir embora’ (‘It’s time for Jair [Bolsonaro] to pack his bags and go’). All week long, the song kept playing, people kept singing it – waiters, street sweepers, doormen and women, shop assistants, rubbish collectors – and according to word on the beach at Porto da Barra in Salvador da Bahia on Monday morning, it was number two on Spotify. You hear it everywhere. More than any other city and state in Brazil, Salvador and Bahia vote for Lula, not Bolsonaro, who has never won a single district in the country’s third-largest city; Bolsonaro lost the state by 3.75 million votes, with Lula taking 72.1 per cent. When the sun set on Sunday, at roughly 5.30 p.m., Rio Vermelho in Salvador was a sea of people, expectant and dressed in red, waving white banners, awaiting the results of the most important presidential elections in anyone’s lifetime – perhaps the most important the world has seen this century.

Mike Davis’s work reached my generation of radical readers in the 1990s, in the context of the fall of the USSR, the rise of Clintonist third-way triage, the EZLN in Chiapas, and the interpenetration of capital across the Pacific. I caught onto him in Portland, Oregon. There was something in his writing that had the immediacy and raw rage of punk or hip hop. He spoke to us in a way that few of his generation could have, because he was listening so closely to young people, especially as he patrolled the meaner streets of LA to learn about them, comparing what he knew of previous generations in the city to what he was hearing from the young and imagining for their future. Throughout the time I knew him personally, for most of the last two decades, he maintained his sense of urgent responsibility and debt towards the generations coming after him, and even a certain optimism about defining democratically feasible and ecologically sustainable forms of social transformation.

In Brazil, where Christopher Columbus is not well known, 12 October is a federal holiday in honour of children, as well as an important day in the Brazilian Catholic religious calendar, with a pilgrimage in São Paulo to the sanctuary of Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida. The statue was supposedly discovered in a river in São Paulo’s interior by three fishermen in 1717, who were blessed by abundant catches thereafter. Though she started out white, the river turned her black; or perhaps it was the smoke from the fishermen’s votive candles. In any event, she is a powerful symbol of liberty for the Afro-descended majority, in a country where slavery formally ended only in 1888.

In Porto da Barra, Lula flags waved at the entrances to the beach on Sunday, while part of the crew that works there handed out stickers to passers-by and plastered them on each other. Bolsonaro supporters dressed in yellow and green were few and far between, and, with new reggae songs dedicated to Lula coming out of the soundsystem, Bahia was prepped and ready for a festa. If Bahia were Brasil, that would have happened, since people here voted close to 70 per cent for Lula in the first round of the presidential election, giving him over 3.8 million more votes than Bolsonaro. But Bahia is not Brazil.

In spite of a recent drug-related shooting – and mounting violence against PT supporters nationwide – the excitement and ebullience on the beach at Porto da Barra in Salvador are palpable, and barely contained. An older man dressed in yellow who sells cashews took a break for a beer late on Sunday morning, and said he could hardly wait; like many precarious baianos, he is at the end of his rope. The other day, a man who lives on the streets was dressed in a felt hat, rope sandals and an orange jumpsuit with red Lula stickers plastered all over it. In the final days before the general election, Lula is hitting his stride: there is a real chance he will win in the first round.