Forrest Hylton

On 2 July, Bahian Independence Day, both Bolsonaro and Lula held campaign rallies in Salvador. The far-right incumbent addressed supporters at the Farol da Barra, where the Portuguese and the Tupinambá built the city’s first fort at the turn of the fifteenth century, and went from there by motorcycle cavalcade along the shoreline to Boca do Rio. The left-wing challenger appeared at Dois de Julho, a popular market in the city centre, where the Independence Day parade set off for Campo Grande. The floats commemorated Bahia’s tenacious armed resistance to the Portuguese nearly two hundred years ago: enslaved and free people of colour, indigenous people, caboclos and mestiços, as well as planters and slaveowners, and Maria Quitéria, who disguised herself as a man in order to enlist.

Despite the rain, a massive street party to celebrate democracy started in Colombia on Sunday evening and lasted through the night. Though the hangover is likely to be severe, cities erupted with joy and relief. Most final polls, taken a week before yesterday’s election, showed Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández more or less even, but Petro won by 50.44 to 47.3, with 11.28 million votes, nearly three million more than he got in the first round on 29 May. Hernández, who got 10.57 million votes, over five million more than in the first round, conceded immediately and quietly, from his home in Bucaramanga, Santander. President Iván Duque announced he would begin to work with Petro’s team to handover power on 7 August. Petro invited the Colombian people to celebrate their victory.

The first round of Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday was followed by several moderate earthquakes in Antioquia and Santander. The former is home to the right-wing candidate Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez, and the only department that he won; the latter to Rodolfo Hernández, ‘the little old guy on TikTok’, who ran as an anti-corruption ‘outsider’ candidate, like Trump, Bolsonaro or Alberto Fujimori. Boosted by former president Álvaro Uribe’s supporters, Fico performed more or less as expected, picking up 23.9 per cent of the vote, while Hernández, a 77-year-old businessman and former mayor of Bucaramanga, took 28.2 per cent, to everyone’s surprise, even though polls registered his surge in the final weeks of campaigning. The frontrunner, Gustavo Petro, took 40.3 per cent, an improvement on his performance in 2018 – and the first time a candidate from the left has ever won the first round – but not enough, it would seem, to defeat the right in the second round of voting on 19 June.

Bolsonaro shares Putin’s loathing of communism and the USSR, and tries to associate Lula and the PT with both. That didn’t stop him, during his recent junket to Moscow, paying tribute to the Red Army’s victory over the Nazis in the Second World War; a position all the more incoherent because neo-Nazis have occupied prominent places in Bolsonaro’s administration.

When the coup that overthrew Evo Morales in 2019 brought an unknown senator and political newcomer, Jeanine Áñez, to the Bolivian presidency, the Brazilian government was the first to offer official recognition. In the run up to the coup, one of the leading plotters, Fernando ‘Macho’ Camacho, currently the governor of Santa Cruz, met with Brazil’s foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo.